1.4 Billion Pixel Camera To Watch For Asteroids

SpaceSlug writes "The world's largest digital camera is to be used to keep an eye out for asteroids heading towards Earth. The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) has been built by researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab. At its heart is a 1.4 billion pixel (or 1400 megapixel) camera that will scan the night sky looking for rogue near-Earth objects from atop Mount Haleakala in Maui Island, Hawaii. The system uses something called an orthogonal transfer CCD to remove atmospheric blur from images."

Comments

To fully fund the project year round

[deft]

You just need to point her down at the beaches of Hawaii a few times a year and capture some of the scenery.

can you say gigapixelboobs.com?

Re:To fully fund the project year round

[mcgrew]

It's looking for asteroids. If it was a British telescope it would be looking for arseteroids.

Re:To fully fund the project year round

[Falkkin]

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=5322

5.3 gigapixel image of Hanauma Bay in Hawaii.

Pending Doom

[tripdizzle]

So now we will be able to see asteroids that could slam into our planet and possibly end life, but then what? Hit it with a missile or go Armageddon style on it?

Re:Pending Doom

[Last_Available_Usern]

The problem with illiciting action is proving risk. No ones going to mitigate a one in a million possibility. However, if you find some near-Earth objects that you can show have a 25% chance of hitting the Earth in the next 50 years, you might see a lot more development in the way of mitigation (or disaster planning at least).

Re:Pending Doom

[evanbd]

For starters, it's worth worrying about asteroids that would merely destroy a city rather than end life as we know it. And, if you spot them early, there are a number of techniques that could deflect them. With plenty of time to work, small changes in velocity can cause large changes in position years in the future -- turning an impact into a near miss. This is especially true if there is a close approach to another body before the impact, as small changes in position at the approach turn into larger changes in velocity.

If you only need a tiny course correction, there are plenty of options. A gravitational tug, for example (put a spacecraft near the asteroid, use ion engines to maintain position, and let gravitational forces pull the asteroid toward the ship, and vice versa). That lets you use an ion engine to nudge the asteroid without solving the problems of landing on it or grabbing it. If you can get away with even less total impulse, you can simply paint a large portion of it white and let light pressure from the Sun do the work for you.

Things like large rocket engines and nuclear blasts are crude, blunt instruments; if you have warning, a more subtle approach is appropriate.

Re:Pending Doom

[HarvardAce]

With plenty of time to work, small changes in velocity can cause large changes in position years in the future -- turning an impact into a near miss.

Or, given the fact that even the most advanced prediction algorithms still have to cut some corners (therefore leading to some uncertainty), it could turn a near miss into an impact.

Re:Pending Doom

[east coast]

Hit it with a missile or go Armageddon style on it?

As long as it gets rid of Bruce Willis it's a win-win situation.

Re:Pending Doom

[Tablizer]

Or, given the fact that even the most advanced prediction algorithms still have to cut some corners (therefore leading to some uncertainty)

Cut corners? You mean along the lines of using type Float instead of Double? More likely the errors are due to natural issues such as sun-light reflecting off the surface of the roid in unknown ways giving it a slight push or imprecise knowledge about Jupiter's gravity profile at given distances. When a roid passes close to a planet, small differences in path can be greatly magnified. Thus any small error turns into a larger error when forecasting past the rendezvous point.

Re:Pending Doom

[HarvardAce]

More likely the errors are due to natural issues such as sun-light reflecting off the surface of the roid in unknown ways giving it a slight push or imprecise knowledge about Jupiter's gravity profile at given distances.

This is exactly what I meant by "cut corners." Probably not the best way to describe it, but there are, at the roughest level, three different items that lead to error in predicting trajectories. The first is errors/inprecision in measurements, which this camera will help reduce. The second is us not knowing exactly how certain forces will affect a particular asteroid. The last is the inability to accurately simulate the forces that we do know, due to computational complexity. It is here where things are simplified (i.e. corners are cut) in order to be able to run a simulation at all. I suppose "cutting corners" has a connotation of laziness as opposed to necessity -- in this case, it is not because astronomers are lazy -- it is just that we do not have the technology or computational horsepower to be able to accurately simulate every known force on a particular asteroid (let alone the unknown forces that we don't know about).

The best we can do is attempt to determine the upper limits on the errors that all these unknowns/simplifications can cause on a particular trajectory. By doing this, if we have a potential impact, no matter how small, we may be able to adjust the trajectory enough to ensure that the projected trajectory, along with all potential error, still leaves the object safely out of harm's way.

Re:Pending Doom

[Amazing Proton Boy]

Um,no. You have missed the point.

It has nothing to do with a shock wave. The theory is that the detonation will heat the surface of the asteroid causing a thin layer to vaporize and move away from the body thus imparting a small thrust and altering the trajectory.

Re:So how many ..

[Kagura]

1.41 jiggapixels, panning at 88 arcseconds per hour.

Damn

[MightyMartian]

Damn, now it means that when my brother-in-law sets his next camera to maximum resolution (as he always does), I'm going to get 50gb image files.

Re:Damn

[qwertphobia]

Martin? Bro? Is that you? I have a question for you:

why does the internet get slow every time i send you pictures?

Re:So how many ..

[AioKits]

When this baby hits 88 arcseconds per hour, you're going to see some serious shit.

Re:So how many ..

[Rayban]

One point four jiggapixels? One point four jiggapixels?? Great scott!

What? The're in space?

[zappepcs]

Last time I looked, Asteroids was at the local bowling alley. Do I win a prize? Do these youngster space explorer types need any more investigative help? All the comets they need are under my kitchen sink! there! ba da bing! Oh, my neighbor guy has Saturn in his driveway! But if you guys need help or a camera to find Uranus... damn, I'm out!

Kodak moment

[girlintraining]

Well, it's almost as good as what the NSA uses to spy on you with. Aren't you glad we have our priorities straight in this country?

It's a bird! It's a plane!

[yogibaer]

No, it's a lost toolbag! So many practical applications for things lost in space.

Re:It's a bird! It's a plane!

[MaxwellEdison]

Anyyone aboard the ISS who goes "Oh noes" should immediately be sent out of the airlock, sans suit.

Astronomy Magazine

[Neuropol]

I think i just read some thing about this in Astronomy Magazine from earlier this year. The sensitivity and rapid ability to shoot large areas in a short amount of time will allow for this telescope to scan and record the entire Hawaiian skies every 3 days in search of Asteroids, Supernovae, and other phenomenon.

Re:In need of perspective?

[Darth_brooks]

Asteroid hunting doesn't really have anything to do with blue or red shifting. You're not looking to see whether a distant object is moving towards or away form you. More likely, they're looking at dots. Specifically, which dots in picture A moved in comparison to picture B and which one didn't.

Think of it this way: Step out at night and look at the stars and whatever planet happens to be in view. Now, step out the next night at precisely the same time (ok, to be fair, a couple minutes later) and look again. The stars are in the same spot, but the planet has moved.

With high-res digital cameras you can take very precise pictures, then let software pick out which of the faint dots are distant stars, and which maybe be asteroids. It's a pretty standard way of discovering and plotting the course of the various odds and ends floating around our solar system.

Blurred summary

[mcgrew]

The system uses something called an orthogonal transfer CCD to remove atmospheric blur from images.

Shoddy. "Something called?" Come on, guys, this is supposed to be "news for nerds". If you can't find it on wikipedia, use google.

orthogonal transfer CCD (OTCCD)

We have designed and built a new type of CCD that we call an orthogonal transfer CCD (OTCCD), which permits parallel clocking horizontally as well as vertically. The device has been used successfully to remove image motion caused by atmospheric turbulence at rates up to 100 Hz, and promises to be a better, cheaper way to carry out image motion correction for imaging than by using fast tip/tilt mirrors. We report on the device characteristics, and find that the large number of transfers needed to track image motion does not significantly degrade the image either because of charge transfer inefficiency or because of charge traps. For example, after 100 sec of tracking at 100 Hz approximately 3% of the charge would diffuse into a skirt around the point spread function. Four nights of data at the Michigan-Dartmouth-MIT (MDM) 2.4-m telescope also indicate that the atmosphere is surprisingly benign, in terms of both the speed and coherence angle of image motion. Image motion compensation improved image sharpness by about 0.5'' in quadrature with no degradation over a field of at least 3 arcminutes. (SECTION: Astronomical Instrumentation)

And I'll just bet..

[Channard]

... the manufacturers only included a 16mb SD card.

A 1.4-gigapixel camera to detect asteroids

[rpiquepa]

You also should read a story published 4 days ago about this camera by ZDNet. Here is a link to this article, which contains several pictures not included in the Technology Review article.

Re:Can it capture UFO license plate numbers?

[mcgrew]

UFOs by definition don't have visible license plates. If it had a license plate it wouldn't be unidentified, now would it?

Awesome pics

[raind]

I don't know about anyone else but I find stuff like this to be really inspiring. Why is that astronomy in general doesn't get more mainstream media coverage?

Re:In need of perspective?

[JayAitch]

Maybe for very far objects outside the solar system, but for these objects the earth moves a significant distance within a day. Backyard astronomers do this all the time.

Re:Can it capture UFO license plate numbers?

[mschuyler]

Except if you can't read the plate, it remains unidentifed. Hence the need for this camera.