NEAT has a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Air Force to use a GEODSS telescope located on Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii. GEODSS stands for Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance and these wide field Air Force telescopes were designed to optically observe Earth orbital spacecraft. The NEAT team designed a CCD camera and computer system for the GEODSS telescope. The CCD camera format is 4096 × 4096 pixels and the field of view is 1.2° × 1.6°.
Beginning in April 2001, the 1.2 metre aperture Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory was also put into service to discover and track near-Earth objects. This telescope is equipped with three cameras, each of which has its own 4096 × 4096 CCD array. This is the telescope that produced the images leading to the discovery of 50000 Quaoar in 2002, and 90377 Sedna in 2003 (published 2004).
In addition to discovering thousands of asteroids, NEAT is also credited with the co-discovery (recovery) of periodic comet54P/de Vico-Swift-NEAT and of the high proper motion Teegarden's star.
External links
Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (http://neat.jpl.nasa.gov/)
In addition to discovering thousands of asteroids, NEAT is also credited with the co-discovery (recovery) of periodic comet 54P/de Vico-Swift-NEAT and of the high proper motion Teegarden's star.
Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are asteroids whose orbit intersects Earth's orbit and which may therefore pose a collision danger, as well as being most easily accessible for spacecraft from Earth.
The threat of an Earth impact was emphasized by the collision of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter on July 16, 1994, resulting in explosive impacts that would have been catastrophic on Earth.
Asteroid (29075) 1950 DA was lost after its discovery in 1950 since not enough observations were made to allow plotting its orbit, and then rediscovered on December 31, 2000.
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