80NSSC18K1575

The Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) was awarded a 5-year grant by NASA NEOO in 2013 to construct and operate wide field telescopes that are capable of scanning the entire sky each night to magnitude 20.

The particular strength of ATLAS is to be complementary to larger telescopes such as Pan-STARRS and Catalina - ATLAS covers much more area each night to a shallower depth.

ATLAS is designed to be an "early warning" system that will provide three weeks' notice of most 140M asteroids or comets on track to hit the Earth and a week's notice for most 50M asteroids.

We have completed two ATLAS units and installed them on Haleakala and Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The telescopes operate completely robotically each night and throughout the night the data are reduced in real-time on each summit and analyzed for candidate near-Earth asteroids.

In the morning, a human reviewer verifies the new asteroids in the nightly processing and submits astrometry to the IAU Minor Planet Center.

We observe about half the visible sky each night five times with the two-telescope system but at reduced sensitivity due to improperly figured Schmidt correctors on the telescopes.

Replacement lenses from a different vendor are expected to be installed in April 2017, improving the sensitivity of the system from M~19 to the designed capability of M~20 and increasing the discovery rate by more than 5x.

To date, in early 2017, ATLAS has discovered 34 NEAs and 5 PHAs since the start of operations.

Except for delays due to the Schmidt correctors, all other aspects of the build construction and commissioning of both the hardware and software projects have been on-time and on-budget.

We are proposing to build two more identical "ATLAS units" and deploy them at the best sites possible. We expect that these sites will be SAAO in South Africa and Chile, but we will perform a competitive search for alternate sites once the proposal is funded.

Because of the diversity in latitude, longitude, and weather, these two additional units should double the ATLAS discovery rate of the most pernicious PHAs - the 20-50M asteroids that pass very close to the Earth and are only visible to any telescope for a short time.

University Of Hawaii

43.001 - Science

Shared Services Center (NSSC) [NASA]

Honolulu, Hawaii 96822-2247 United States

Single Zip Code

None

Amendment Since initial award the End Date has been extended from 08/14/22 to 08/14/24 and the total obligations have increased 671% from $500,000 to $3,855,036.