Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System

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Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System
Alternative namesATLAS Project
Observatory code T05 (ATLAS-HKO)
T08 (ATLAS-MLO)
Website fallingstar.com/home.php
[ edit on Wikidata]

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) is a robotic astronomical survey and early warning system optimized for detecting smaller near-Earth objects a few weeks to days before they impact Earth.

Contents

Funded by NASA, and developed and operated by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, the system currently has four 0.5-meter telescopes. Two are located 160 km apart in the Hawaiian islands, at Haleakala (ATLAS-HKO, Observatory code T05) and Mauna Loa (ATLAS-MLO, Observatory code T08) observatories, one is located at the Sutherland Observatory (ATLAS–SAAO, Observatory code M22) in South Africa, and one is at the El Sauce Observatory in Rio Hurtado (Chile) (Observatory code W68).

ATLAS began observations in 2015 with one telescope at Haleakala, and a two-Hawaii-telescopes version became operational in 2017. The project then obtained NASA funding for two additional telescopes in the Southern hemisphere, which became operational in early 2022. [1] Each telescope surveys one quarter of the whole observable sky four times per clear night, [2] and the addition of the two southern telescopes improved ATLAS's four-fold coverage of the observable sky from every two clear nights to nightly, as well as filled its previous blind spot in the far southern sky. [3]

Context

Major astronomical impact events have significantly shaped Earth's history, having been implicated in the formation of the Earth–Moon system, the origin of water on Earth, the evolutionary history of life, and several mass extinctions. Notable prehistorical impact events include the Chicxulub impact by a 10 kilometer asteroid 66 million years ago, believed to be the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event which eliminated all non-avian dinosaurs [4] and three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth. [5] [6] The 37 million years old asteroid impact that excavated the Mistastin crater generated temperatures exceeding 2,370 °C, the highest known to have naturally occurred on the surface of the Earth. [7]

Throughout recorded history, hundreds of Earth impacts (and meteor air bursts) have been reported, with some very small fraction causing deaths, injuries, property damage, or other significant localised consequences. [8] Stony asteroids with a diameter of 4 meters (13 ft) enter Earth's atmosphere approximately once per year. [9] Asteroids with a diameter of 7 meters enter the atmosphere about every 5 years, with as much kinetic energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (approximately 16 kilotons of TNT). Their air burst dissipates about one third of that kinetic energy, or 5 kilotons. [9] These relatively small asteroids ordinarily explode in the upper atmosphere and most or all of their solids are vaporized. [10] Asteroids with a diameter of 20 m (66 ft) strike Earth approximately twice every century. One of the best-known impacts in historical times is the 50 meter 1908 Tunguska event, which most likely caused no injuries but which leveled several thousand square kilometers of forest in a very sparsely populated part of Siberia, Russia. A similar impact over a more populous region would have caused locally catastrophic damage. [11] The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor event is the only known impact in historical times to have resulted in a large number of injuries, with the potential exception of the possibly highly deadly but poorly documented 1490 Qingyang event in China. The approximately 20 meter Chelyabinsk meteor is the largest recorded object to have impacted a continent of the Earth since the Tunguska event.

Future impacts are bound to occur, with much higher odds for smaller regionally damaging asteroids than for larger globally damaging ones. The 2018 final book of physicist Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions , considers a large asteroid collision the biggest threat to our planet. [12] [13] [14] In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported "It's a 100 per cent certainty we'll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we're not 100 per cent sure when." [15] In June 2018, the US National Science and Technology Council warned that America is unprepared for an asteroid impact event, and has developed and released the "National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy Action Plan" to better prepare. [16] [17] [18] [19] [20]

NEA by survey.svg
Annually discovered NEAs by survey since 1995
NEA 1 km or more.svg
Large NEAs (at least 1 km in diameter) discovered each year
  •    LINEAR
  •    NEAT
  •    Spacewatch
  •    LONEOS
  •    CSS
  •    Pan-STARRS
  •    NEOWISE
  •    ATLAS
  •   Other-US
  •   Others

Larger asteroids can be detected even while far from the Earth, and their orbits can therefore be very precisely determined many years in advance of any close approach. Thanks largely to Spaceguard cataloging initiated by a 2005 mandate of the United States Congress to NASA, [21] the inventory of the approximately one thousand Near Earth Objects with diameters above 1 kilometer was for instance 97% complete in 2017. [22] The slowly improving completeness for 140 meter objects is estimated to be around 40%, and the planned NEO Surveyor NASA mission is expected to identify almost all of them by 2040. Any impact by one of these known asteroids would be predicted decades to centuries in advance, long enough to consider deflecting them away from Earth. None of them will impact Earth for at least the next century, and we are therefore largely safe from globally civilisation-ending kilometer-size impacts for at least the mid-term future. Regionally catastrophic impacts by asteroids a few hundred meters across cannot, on the other hand, be excluded at this point in time.

Sub-140m impacting asteroids would not cause large scale damage but are still locally catastrophic. They are much more common and they can, by contrast to larger ones, only be detected when they come very close to the Earth. In most cases this only happens during their final approach. Those impacts therefore will always need a constant watch and they typically cannot be identified earlier than a few weeks in advance, far too late for interception. According to expert testimony in the United States Congress in 2013, NASA would at that time have required at least five years of preparation before a mission to intercept an asteroid could be launched. [23] This time could be much reduced by pre-planning a ready to launch mission, but the post-launch years needed to first meet the asteroid and then to slowly deflect it by at least the diameter of the Earth would be extremely hard to compress.

Naming

The Last Alert part of the ATLAS name acknowledges that the system will find smaller asteroids years too late for potential deflection but would provide the days or weeks of warning needed to evacuate and otherwise prepare a target area. According to ATLAS project lead John Tonry, "that's enough time to evacuate the area of people, take measures to protect buildings and other infrastructure, and be alert to a tsunami danger generated by ocean impacts". [24] Most of the more than 1 billion rubles damage [25] and of the 1500 injuries [26] caused by the 17-m Chelyabinsk meteor impact in 2013 were from window glass broken by its shock wave. [27] With even a few hours advance warning, those losses and injuries could have been much reduced by actions as simple as propping all windows open before the impact and staying away from them.

Overview

The ATLAS project was developed at the University of Hawaii with US$5 million initial funding from NASA, and its first element was deployed on Haleakala in 2015. [28] This first telescope became fully operational at the end of 2015, and the second one on Mauna Loa in March 2017. Replacement of the initially substandard Schmidt corrector plates of both telescopes in June 2017 brought their image quality closer to its nominal 2 pixels (3.8") width and consequently improved their sensitivity by one magnitude. [29] In August 2018, the project obtained US$3.8 million of additional NASA funding to install two telescopes in the Southern hemisphere. One is now hosted by the South African Astronomical Observatory and the other at the El Sauce Observatory in Chile. Both started operating in early 2022. [1] [30] [31] This geographical expansion of ATLAS provides visibility of the far Southern sky, more continuous coverage, better resilience to bad weather, and additional information on the asteroid orbit from the parallax effect. [32] The full ATLAS concept consists of eight telescopes, spread over the globe for 24h/24h coverage of the full night sky.

As long as their radiant is not too close to the Sun, the automated system provides a one-week warning for a 45 metres (150 ft) diameter asteroid, and a three-week warning for a 120 m (390 ft) one. [28] By comparison, the February 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor impact was from an object estimated at 17 m (60 ft) diameter. Its arrival direction happened to be close to the Sun [33] and it therefore was in the blind spot of any Earth-based visible light warning system. A similar object arriving from a dark direction would now be detected by ATLAS a few days in advance. [34]

As a by-product of its main design goal, ATLAS can identify any moderately bright variable or moving object in the night sky. It therefore also looks for variable stars, [35] supernovae, [28] dwarf planets, comets, and non-impacting asteroids. [36]

Design and operation

The full ATLAS concept consists of eight 50-centimeter diameter f/2 Wright-Schmidt telescopes, spread over the globe for full-night-sky and 24h/24h coverage, and each fitted with a 110 Megapixel CCD array camera. The current system consists of four such telescopes: ATLAS1 and ATLAS2 operate 160 km apart on the Haleakala and Mauna Loa volcanoes in the Hawaiian Islands, the third telescope is at the South African Astronomical Observatory and the fourth in Chile. [37] [38] [39] [1] These telescopes are notable for their large 7.4° field of view — about 15 times the diameter of the full moon — of which their 10 500 × 10 500 CCD camera images the central 5.4° × 5.4°. This system can image the whole night sky visible from a single location with about 1000 separate telescope pointings. At 30 seconds per exposure plus 10 seconds for simultaneously reading out the camera and repointing the telescope, each ATLAS unit can therefore scan the whole visible sky a little over once each night, with a median completeness limit at apparent magnitude 19. [40] Since the mission of ATLAS is to identify moving objects, each telescope actually observes one quarter of the sky four times in a night at approximately 15-minute intervals. In perfect conditions, the four telescopes together can therefore observe the full night sky every night, but bad weather at one or the other site, occasional technical problems, and even the odd volcanic eruption of Mauna Loa, [41] all reduce the effective coverage rate. The four exposures by a telescope allow to automatically link multiple observations of an asteroid into a preliminary orbit, with some robustness to the loss of one observation to overlap between the asteroid and a bright star, and to then predict its approximate position on subsequent nights for follow-up. Apparent magnitude 19 is classified as "respectably but not extremely faint", and is approximately 100 000 times too faint to be seen with a naked eye from a very dark location. It is equivalent to the light of a match flame in New York viewed from San Francisco. ATLAS therefore scans the visible sky in much less depth, but much more quickly, than larger surveying telescope arrays such as University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS. Pan-STARRS goes approximately 100 times deeper, but needs weeks instead of a quarter of a night to scan the whole sky just once. [28] This makes ATLAS better suited to finding small asteroids which can only be seen during the just few days that they brighten dramatically when they happen to pass very close to the Earth.

NASA's Near Earth Observation Program initially provided a US$5 million grant, with $3.5 million covering the first three years of design, construction and software development, and the balance of the grant to fund the systems operation for two years following its entry into full operational service in late 2015. [42] Further NASA grants funded continued operation of ATLAS [43] and the construction of the two Southern telescopes. [31]

Global NEO survey sites.jpg
Now complete, the new ATLAS sites have filled in the previous lack of coverage in the Southern hemisphere (see Asteroid impact prediction). Sited around 120° (8 hours) east of existing surveys, the ATLAS South Africa telescope (and the planned NEOSTEL in Sicily) also provide warnings during the Hawaiian/Chilean and California daytimes. This mostly matters for small asteroids which become bright enough for detection for at most a day or two.

Discoveries

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Near-Earth object</span> Small Solar System body with an orbit that can bring it close to Earth

A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body orbiting the Sun whose closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 times the Earth–Sun distance. This definition applies to the object's orbit around the Sun, rather than its current position, thus an object with such an orbit is considered an NEO even at times when it is far from making a close approach of Earth. If an NEO's orbit crosses the Earth's orbit, and the object is larger than 140 meters (460 ft) across, it is considered a potentially hazardous object (PHO). Most known PHOs and NEOs are asteroids, but about 0.35% are comets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Impact event</span> Collision of two astronomical objects

An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. Impact events have been found to regularly occur in planetary systems, though the most frequent involve asteroids, comets or meteoroids and have minimal effect. When large objects impact terrestrial planets such as the Earth, there can be significant physical and biospheric consequences, as the impacting body is usually traveling at several kilometres a second, though atmospheres mitigate many surface impacts through atmospheric entry. Impact craters and structures are dominant landforms on many of the Solar System's solid objects and present the strongest empirical evidence for their frequency and scale.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spaceguard</span> Efforts to study asteroids that might impact Earth

The term Spaceguard loosely refers to a number of efforts to discover, catalogue, and study near-Earth objects (NEO), especially those that may impact Earth.

Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) was a program run by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, surveying the sky for near-Earth objects. NEAT was conducted from December 1995 until April 2007, at GEODSS on Hawaii, as well as at Palomar Observatory in California. With the discovery of more than 40 thousand minor planets, NEAT has been one of the most successful programs in this field, comparable to the Catalina Sky Survey, LONEOS and Mount Lemmon Survey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Haleakalā Observatory</span> Astronomical observatory on Maui Island, Hawaii, USA

The Haleakalā Observatory, also known as the Haleakalā High Altitude Observatory Site, is Hawaii's first astronomical research observatory. It is located on the island of Maui and is owned by the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi, which operates some of the facilities on the site and leases portions to other organizations. Tenants include the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN). At over 3,050 meters (10,010 ft) in altitude, the summit of Haleakalā is above one third of the Earths's troposphere and has excellent astronomical seeing conditions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pan-STARRS</span> Multi-telescope astronomical survey

The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System located at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii, US, consists of astronomical cameras, telescopes and a computing facility that is surveying the sky for moving or variable objects on a continual basis, and also producing accurate astrometry and photometry of already-detected objects. In January 2019 the second Pan-STARRS data release was announced. At 1.6 petabytes, it is the largest volume of astronomical data ever released.

2007 WD5 is an Apollo asteroid some 50 m (160 ft) in diameter and a Mars-crosser asteroid first observed on 20 November 2007, by Andrea Boattini of the Catalina Sky Survey. Early observations of 2007 WD5 caused excitement amongst the scientific community when it was estimated as having as high as a 1 in 25 chance of colliding with Mars on 30 January 2008. However, by 9 January 2008, additional observations allowed NASA's Near Earth Object Program (NEOP) to reduce the uncertainty region resulting in only a 1-in-10,000 chance of impact. 2007 WD5 most likely passed Mars at a distance of 6.5 Mars radii. Due to this relatively small distance and the uncertainty level of the prior observations, the gravitational effects of Mars on its trajectory are unknown and, according to Steven Chesley of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near-Earth Object program, 2007 WD5 is currently considered 'lost' (see lost asteroids).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">367943 Duende</span> Near-Earth object

367943 Duende (provisional designation 2012 DA14) is a micro-asteroid and a near-Earth object of the Aten and Atira group, approximately 30 meters (98 ft) in diameter. It was discovered by astronomers of the Astronomical Observatory of Mallorca at its robotic La Sagra Observatory in 2012, and named for the duende, a goblin-like creature from Iberian and Filipino mythology and folklore. Duende is likely an uncommon L-type asteroid and significantly elongated. For an asteroid of its size, it has a relatively long rotation period of 9.485 hours.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sentinel Space Telescope</span> Killer asteroid detector canceled as of 2017

The Sentinel Space Telescope was a space observatory to be developed by Ball Aerospace & Technologies for the B612 Foundation. The B612 Foundation is dedicated to protecting the Earth from dangerous asteroid strikes and Sentinel was to be the Foundation's first spacecraft tangibly to address that mission.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chelyabinsk meteor</span> Near-Earth asteroid that fell over Russia in 2013

The Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over the southern Ural region in Russia on 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT. It was caused by an approximately 18 m (59 ft) diameter, 9,100-tonne (10,000-short-ton) near-Earth asteroid that entered the atmosphere at a shallow 18.3 ± 0.4 degree angle with a speed relative to Earth of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second. The light from the meteor was briefly brighter than the Sun, visible as far as 100 km (60 mi) away. It was observed in a wide area of the region and in neighbouring republics. Some eyewitnesses also reported feeling intense heat from the fireball.

<span class="nowrap">2015 TB<sub>145</sub></span> Asteroid

2015 TB145 is a sub-kilometer asteroid, classified as near-Earth object and potentially hazardous asteroid of the Apollo group, approximately 650 meters (2,000 feet) in diameter. It safely passed 1.27 lunar distances from Earth on 31 October 2015 at 17:01 UTC, and passed by Earth again in November 2018.

2016 EU85 is an asteroid, classified as near-Earth object and potentially hazardous asteroid of the Apollo group, approximately 400 meters in diameter. It was first observed on 10 March 2016, by the Pan-STARRS survey at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii, United States.

<span class="nowrap">2017 VL<sub>2</sub></span>

2017 VL2 is a micro-asteroid, classified as a near-Earth object of the Apollo group. It was first observed by ATLAS at Mauna Loa Observatory on 10 November 2017, a day after it passed inside the orbit of Earth.

<span class="nowrap">2017 OO<sub>1</sub></span> Small asteroid

2017 OO1 is a small asteroid, classified as near-Earth object of the Aten group, approximately 35–76 meters (115–249 feet) in diameter. It was first observed on 23 July 2017, by the robotic ATLAS survey at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, two days after the object had approached Earth at 0.33 lunar distances on 21 July 2017.

<span class="nowrap">2017 XO<sub>2</sub></span>

2017 XO2, also written 2017 XO2, is a sub-kilometer asteroid and near-Earth object of the Apollo group approximately 110 meters (360 feet) in diameter. The asteroid was discovered by Pan-STARRS in December 2017, after it already had approached Earth at 0.051 AU (7,600,000 km) or 20 lunar distances (LD) on 6 November 2017. On 26 April 2057, it will pass Earth at a similar distance of 21 LD again.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asteroid impact prediction</span> Prediction of the dates and times of asteroids impacting Earth

Asteroid impact prediction is the prediction of the dates and times of asteroids impacting Earth, along with the locations and severities of the impacts.

2018 VP1 is an Apollo near-Earth asteroid roughly 2 meters (7 feet) in diameter. The asteroid had a 0.41% chance (1 in 240) of impacting Earth on 2 November 2020 01:12 UT. It was discovered on 3 November 2018 when it was about 0.003 AU (450,000 km; 280,000 mi) from Earth and had a solar elongation of 165 degrees. The asteroid has a short 12.9 day observation arc. It was last observed on 16 November 2018 by the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope at apparent magnitude 26 pushing the telescope close to the limiting magnitude.

<span class="nowrap">2020 BX<sub>12</sub></span> Binary near-Earth asteroid

2020 BX12 is a sub-kilometer binary asteroid, classified as a near-Earth asteroid and potentially hazardous object of the Apollo group. It was discovered on 27 January 2020 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System survey at the Mauna Loa Observatory during its approach to Earth of 0.02915 AU (4.361 million km; 11.34 LD). Radar observations of the asteroid were carried out by the Arecibo Observatory on 4 February 2020, revealing a natural satellite orbiting 360 m (1,180 ft) from the primary body.

2020 VT4 is a tiny near-Earth asteroid that passed 370 km (230 mi) above Earth's surface on 13 November 2020 at 17:20 UTC. The asteroid was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey at the Mauna Loa Observatory fifteen hours after its closest approach to Earth. The Earth encounter perturbed the asteroid's trajectory from an Earth-crossing Apollo-type orbit to an Aten-type orbit, subsequently reducing the asteroid's heliocentric orbital period from 1.5 years to 0.86 years.

2022 UR4 is a small near-Earth asteroid that made an extremely close approach within 0.044 lunar distances (17,000 km; 11,000 mi) from Earth's center on 20 October 2022 at 22:45 UTC. It was discovered about 14 hours before closest approach by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey telescope at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii on 20 November 2022. During the close approach, the asteroid passed above the northern hemisphere of Earth and reached a peak brightness of magnitude 10, just 40 times fainter than the threshold of naked eye visibility.

References

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  19. ↑ Chang, Kenneth (14 June 2018). "Asteroids and Adversaries: Challenging What NASA Knows About Space Rocks - Two years ago, NASA dismissed and mocked an amateur's criticisms of its asteroids database. Now Nathan Myhrvold is back, and his papers have passed peer review". The New York Times . Retrieved 25 June 2018.
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  30. ↑ "SAAO to contribute to the global effort to detect Near Earth Objects."
  31. 1 2 Project that spots city-killing asteroids expands to Southern Hemisphere.
  32. ↑ Atlas: How it works. Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System.
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  34. ↑ Breakthrough: UH team successfully locates incoming asteroid
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  36. ↑ 'ATLAS Solar System Catalog V1'
  37. ↑ ATLAS Telescope 2 Installed on Mauna Loa, Ari Heinze Retrieved April 7, 2017.
  38. ↑ Our SAAO colleagues have completed the assembly of the ATLAS dome! Retrieved December 14, 2020.
  39. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2nB46hUuMk feature=youtu.be
  40. ↑ ATLAS Technical Specifications
  41. ↑
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  43. ↑ ATLAS Update #18: 2017 March Retrieved April 14, 2017.
  44. ↑ Minor Planet Center records for 2018 RC
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  47. ↑ ATLAS twitter feed
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