11-06, 17:40–19:00 (US/Arizona), BoFs
Planetary Defense is practical astronomy: the applied science of discovering, tracking, and characterizing near-Earth asteroids and comets (NEOs). The goal is to retire the risk of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids that may impact the Earth in the coming decades.
The first NEO was discovered photographically in 1898, and about a hundred more were discovered by manual photographic techniques before the first automated digital NEO discovery by LPL’s Spacewatch in 1990, just one year before the first ADASS meeting. Since then, more than 30,000 Near-Earth Objects have been discovered by dozens of surveys, with more than 3,000 NEOs per year currently.
Perhaps needless to say, this involves a lot of software.
This BoF will bring together representatives from major NEO surveys, follow-up and characterization projects, both space and ground-based, to discuss the systems engineering and some of the planetary science of the small and sometimes cantankerous bodies in the Solar System. The NEO community provides a microcosm of the larger astronomical time domain, with professional and amateur observers engaging processing and archive centers in near real-time to cooperatively discover and predict the future behavior of often uncomfortably close astronomical bodies. The software and workflows discussed in this BoF will be of interest to many other parts of the ADASS community.
ATLAS Co-PI and senior software engineer Larry Denneau was the chief software architect of the Pan-STARRS moving object processing system (MOPS) and adapted it to ATLAS. MOPS is a software package that automatically identifies solar system objects (in particular hazardous asteroids) in the ATLAS and Pan-STARRS data streams.
Larry has been poking at computer keyboards since the early 80s and received his B.S.E.E. from the University of Arizona, whereupon he quickly escaped academia. His software career has spanned projects ranging from surface metrology for the semiconductor industry, medical scheduling, geophysical instrumentation, and a dot-com Internet startup that actually turned a profit. Now back in academia, Larry received a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Queen's University Belfast and has enthusiastically joined the effort to protect the earth from dangerous asteroids.