Speaker
Description
The Flyeye-1 is the first in a planned network of wide-field survey telescopes developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to strengthen Europe’s capability to discover Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). Its permanent home will be the observatory currently under construction at Mt. Mufara in the Madonie mountains of Sicily.
The Flyeye’s significance to the meteor community lies at the first step of any imminent impactor event: the discovery. Metre-scale objects only become bright enough to detect in the final hours to days before they reach Earth, so finding them means covering as much sky as possible, as often as possible. Flyeye-1 is built for exactly this, with 16 optical channels that together image about 45 square degrees per exposure, allowing the whole visible sky to be covered every three to four nights. Every impactor found this way becomes a predicted fireball, giving observers advance notice of when and where to look.
We present the status of Flyeye-1 following its first round of integration and end-to-end testing at the ASI Space Geodesy Centre in Matera. After the on-sky alignment procedure, the realigned optical channels (6 of 16 so far) reach a mean half-flux diameter of about 4.7 arcsec. Plate solutions against Gaia DR3 give residuals of about 0.65 arcsec, and the image timestamp bias measured with GNSS satellites is 30 ± 14 ms. A first estimate of the 5-sigma limiting magnitude is about 19.4 in 60 s exposures, a preliminary value obtained under light-polluted skies. We also describe the first end-to-end runs of the full observation chain, from scheduling and image acquisition to data processing.
Finally, we report on the progress of the Mt. Mufara observatory and the ongoing relocation of the telescope to its permanent site, and outline the expansion of the network with Flyeye-2 in the Southern Hemisphere.