MRI: Acquisition of an integrated telescope system for astrophysical surveys and transient discovery

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Astronomers conduct wide-area searches of the night sky to search for new kinds objects, or to count and characterize known kinds of objects, or to find objects with specific characteristics. In recent years there have been numerous searches for "moving objects" in an effort to find near earth objects (NEOs). Objects that are close to earth will appear to move across the sky fast enough relative to more distant background objects that their motion can be detected over days or even hours. These objects are relatively nearby and are located within our solar system. Most of them are asteroids or comets. Once detected, the objects can be tracked and their future motion predicted. Of particular interest are objects whose predicted motion will bring them even closer, perhaps dangerously close, to earth. Such objects are called PHAs for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. The Catalina Sky Survey has been conducting an NEO survey from the Mt Lemmon Observatory near Tucson and is the most successful survey in terms of numbers of NEOs discovered - something like 70% of the NEOs that have been discovered in the past few years have been discovered by CSS.One of the problems that such surveys encounter is a "false positive" - finding evidence for what appears to be a moving object on the sky that turns out to be to be something else, perhaps a flaw in a detector, or faint electronic "noise" that mimics a real object, or cosmic rays that pass through the detector leaving marks or streaks that look like objects. If the incidence of false positives could be reduced, the efficiency of such surveys could increase significantly. Dr. David Trilling of Northern Arizona University will acquire a new camera for CSS that covers more sky than its current camera. He will couple his new camera with another camera on another telescope at Lowell Observatory in northern Arizona. These two telescopes will work together, searching the sky for things that move. If a candidate moving object is found with one camera, the second telescope will point its camera to the same part of the sky. If the moving object is detected by both cameras then it is almost surely a real object of interest. Dr. Trilling's work is funded by NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences through the Major Research Instrumentation program.