Recent Advances and Achievements at The Catalina Sky Survey
Abstract
The Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) is a NASA-funded project fully dedicated to discover and track near-Earth objects (NEOs). Since its founding nearly 20 years ago CSS remains at the forefront of NEO surveys, and recent improvements in both instrumentation and software have increased both survey productivity and data quality. In 2016 new large-format (10K x 10K) cameras were installed on both CSS survey telescopes, the 1.5-m reflector and the 0.7-m Schmidt, increasing the field of view, and hence nightly sky coverage by 4x and 2.4x respectively. The new cameras, coupled with improvements in the reduction and detection pipelines, and revised sky-coverage strategies have yielded a dramatic upward trend of NEO discovery rates. CSS has also developed a custom adaptive queue manager for scheduling NEO follow-up astrometry using a remotely operated and recently renovated 1-m Cassegrain reflector telescope, improvements that have increased the production of follow-up astrometry for newly discovered NEOs and arc extensions for previously discovered objects by CSS and other surveys. Additionally, reprocessing of archival CSS data (which includes some 46 million individual astrometric measurements) through the new reduction and detection pipeline will allow for improved orbit determinations and increased arc extensions for hundreds of thousands of asteroids. Reprocessed data will soon feed into a new public archive of CSS images and catalog data products made available through NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS). For the future, CSS is working towards improved NEO follow-up capabilities through a combination of access to larger telescopes, instrument upgrades and follow-up scheduling tools.
- Publication:
-
AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #49
- Pub Date:
- October 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017DPS....4911707L