From the October 2004 issue

Watching over the night

Those who guard planet Earth by looking for asteroids and comets headed our way form a select few — too few, in fact, to let any of us sleep easily.
By | Published: October 27, 2004 | Last updated on May 18, 2023

LONEOS
Lowell Observatory
NASA scientist David Morrison once said that on a typical night, there are more people behind the counter of your local McDonald’s than there are scanning the skies worldwide for killer rocks. That’s no longer true, but the list of search teams isn’t very lengthy. Here are the main on-going programs:
Catalina Sky Survey (CSS)
Web site: www.lpl.arizona.edu/css

Located on Mt. Bigelow in the Santa Catalina mountains north of Tucson, Arizona, the CSS uses a standard Schmidt camera with a 27-inch (68 centimeter) aperture, an f-ratio of 1.9, and a CCD detector. The survey is allied with a southern counterpart, the Siding Spring Survey (see below).

Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR)
Web site: www.ll.mit.edu/linear

The Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research project is run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory. Its funds come from the United States Air Force and NASA. LINEAR uses a pair of 40-inch (1 meter) telescopes originally developed for surveillance of Earth-orbiting satellites. The telescopes are based at Stallion Site, at the north end of White Sands Missile Range in central New Mexico.

Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Survey (LONEOS)
Web site: asteroid.lowell.edu/asteroid/loneos/loneos.html

LONEOS is based on Anderson Mesa, a dozen miles southeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. The search program uses a 24-inch (0.6m) Schmidt telescope equipped with a CCD camera. The site lies in the Coconino National Forest and houses several other Lowell Observatory telescopes. It is the observatory’s dark-sky site.

Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT)
Web site: neat.jpl.nasa.gov

This search program, a cooperative effort between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the United States Air Force, uses two telescopes. The first is a 48-inch (1.2m) telescope at the Air Force’s Maui Space Surveillance Site in Hawaii, the other is the 48-inch (1.2m) Oschin Schmidt camera at Palomar Mountain in California.

Siding Spring Survey (SSS)
Web site: msowww.anu.edu.au/~rmn/index.htm

The Siding Spring Survey uses a 20-inch (50cm) Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, in New South Wales, Australia. It forms the Southern Hemisphere counterpart to the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) near Tucson, Arizona. The SSS is operated jointly by the University of Arizona and the Australian National University, with funding from NASA.

The Spacewatch Project
Web site: spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu

The University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory runs a near-Earth-object (NEO) search program using the Steward Observatory 36-inch (0.9m) Spacewatch telescope and the new Spacewatch 71-inch (1.8m) telescope, both on Kitt Peak in Arizona.

Near-Earth Object Program
Web site: neo.jpl.nasa.gov

This is not a search program, but NASA’s coordinating office for all NEO studies.

Spaceguard Central Node
Web site: spaceguard.esa.int/index.html

The Spaceguard Foundation is an international private organization that combines observers, both professional and amateur, as well as people and organizations with no particular astronomical background who are concerned about the protection of Earth against bombardment from objects of the solar system (comets and asteroids).

Near-Earth Object Program
Web site: neo.jpl.nasa.gov

This is not a search program, but NASA’s coordinating office for all NEO studies.

Spaceguard Central Node
Web site: spaceguard.esa.int/index.html

The Spaceguard Foundation is an international private organization that combines observers, both professional and amateur, as well as people and organizations with no particular astronomical background who are concerned about the protection of Earth against bombardment from objects of the solar system (comets and asteroids).