Speakers
Description
We present the communications architecture for the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) and its suitability as a rapid responder in the global network of NEO detection and tracking. ATLAS is a worldwide system of wide-field telescopes dedicated to searching for hazardous asteroids, especially objects on close-approach or final trajectories. Since its construction in 2015, ATLAS has observed two of the three impacting asteroids detected prior to impact -- 2018 LA and 2019 MO. The system has expanded from a pair of telescopes based in Hawaii to a four-telescope system that can search the entire dark sky from north to south celestial pole every night to a magnitude limit of 19.7 on dark nights.
The ATLAS system is controlled completely by software and is fully robotic -- telescope scheduling and observatory control are fully computer-controlled and data are streamed to Hawaii in real time for image reduction and asteroid processing. The only human participation is the vetting of candidate new near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) that are extracted from the asteroid search. ATLAS data processing excels at measurement of streaked detections and can search for objects close to the Earth with large sky-plane uncertainties. While the ATLAS telescope scheduler normally executes a pre-programmed schedule that rasters a wide declination band, the scheduler is adaptive and can be triggered to inject external requests for targeted followup of asteroids, usually when their sky-plane uncertainties are large. This capability is already in use internally and with selected external observers. The combination of existing robotic infrastructure, adaptive scheduling, and automatic data reductions means that ATLAS can be both a producer of alerts for dangerous objects and a receiver that can assist in astrometric followup.
