2025-08-03 –, Kuiper Space Sciences Lecture Hall (308)
From MPEC N12: "A new NEOCP candidate A11pl3Z was discovered by ATLAS Chile (W68) in four 30-second survey images taken on July 1 UT. Immediate follow-up and precovery observations by Q.-Z. Ye (I41) and S. Deen (W68, M22), including data from June, revealed a highly eccentric, hyperbolic orbit (e ~ 6). There are tentative reports of cometary activity from X09 (S. Deen), G37 (Q.-Z. Ye) and T14 (R. Weryk) with a marginal coma and a short 3" tail at a position angle 280 deg. Additional observations are strongly encouraged to better constrain the object's orbit and nature."
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 the ATLAS survey. 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.