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World's biggest digital camera to join asteroid search

* 17:41 04 September 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* David Shiga


The world's largest digital camera has been installed on a new telescope designed to hunt for potentially dangerous asteroids.

The camera was installed on the PS1 telescope in Maui, Hawaii, US, the first of four telescopes being built as part of a project called the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS).

Pan-STARRS will make frequent scans of the sky, searching for asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth

Typical consumer digital cameras offer imaging chips just a few millimetres across. The new Pan-STARRS camera, by contrast, boasts a light-detecting surface that spans 40 centimetres. Sixty separate chips lie on that surface, providing a total of 1.4 billion pixels.

"This is a truly giant instrument," says John Tonry of the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Hawaii, who led the team that developed the camera. "It allows us to measure the brightness of the sky in 1.4 billion places simultaneously."

"This camera is an incredibly complex instrument, and getting it working has been a magnificent achievement by IfA scientists and engineers," says Rolf-Peter Kudritzki, director of the IfA, which manages the Pan-STARSS project.

Watch a video about the new camera (requires Flash player).

Starting in 2010, when all four of the planned Pan-STARRS telescopes are expected to be completed, the project will image the whole sky visible from Hawaii three times per month. This should allow it to detect objects 100 times fainter than current surveys, including 99% of the asteroids 300 metres or larger that come near Earth's orbit.

NASA is expected to have found about 90% of the objects 1 kilometre or larger in Earth's neighbourhood by 2008. Smaller objects have been less well surveyed. But because the smaller objects are more numerous, they have a higher chance of hitting Earth.

The US Congress has asked NASA to identify 90% of the smaller objects – down to 140 metres across – by 2020, but NASA says it does not have the money to implement the search.


http://space.newscientist.com/articl...id-search.html