Continued Development and Growth of the Skynet Robotic Telescope Network

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Under previous funding from NSF, astronomers at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill have built PROMPT (Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes), which consists of six 16-inch diameter robotic optical telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. To operate this, they have also have developed Skynet: web-based, dynamic queue scheduling and telescope control software capable of controlling many telescopes. The telescopes at Cerro Tololo are part of a wider Skynet Robotic Telescope Network that now spans three, and soon four, continents. Skynet is now being used to study a wide variety of transient and time-variable phenomena, including optical afterglows from gamma-ray bursts. This project will support the efforts of a senior software engineer who will (1) continue to develop Skynet's software; (2) integrate other telescopes into Skynet, growing its geographic and user-community footprints; and (3) lead the effort to expand Skynet's wavelength coverage to the near infrared with the addition of the PROMPT-7 telescope at Cerro Tololo.This effort is expected significantly improve the ability to study gamma-ray bursts and other phenomena. It will also augment the research and research training that is being carried out by Skynet's broader user community, primarily on transient and time-variable phenomena. Over the past three years, approximately 18,000 North Carolina high school students have used Skynet to satisfy state Earth and environmental science graduation requirements and an additional 12,000 middle and elementary school students, as well as members of the general public, have used an introductory version of Skynet's interface to request observations with PROMPT. In this project, these efforts will be broadened to include undergraduate students and to extend the education and outreach efforts at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.