ATLAS The telescope that saw it all
ATLAS is actually designed to detect near-Earth objects before they smash into our planet
Two locations
ATLAS – or the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System – is located at two sites: Haleakala and Mauna Loa. The telescopes are 160 kilometres (100
miles) apart.
Advanced warning
The telescope is designed to provide a day's warning for a 30-kiloton asteroid (which could wipe out a town) and three weeks for a 100-megaton one (a country killer).
The lens
Each equatorially mounted telescope is a 0.5-metre diameter f/2 Wright-Schmidt system and it is fitted with a 110-megapixel CCD array camera.
Two telescopes
Having two separated telescopes allows astronomers to receive extra information about an asteroid by the parallax effect, allowing for more accurate calculations about its orbit.
Good vision
According to ATLAS, the scans of the sky can pick
up stars of magnitude 20, which it says is the equivalent of spotting the light of a match flame in New York from San Francisco – a distance of over 4,000 kilometres (2,585 miles).
Field of view
It has a large 7.4-degree field of view which is about 15-times the diameter of the full Moon. Each can survey a quarter of the whole observable sky four
times per clear night.
Processing images
It is capable of gathering 1,000 images per night on each site, and during that time it can potentially detect as many as
75,000 asteroids.