The Discovery of 3I/ATLAS: the Good, the Bad, and the Lucky
The discovery of the third known interstellar object, comet 3I/ATLAS, caught everybody pleasantly by surprise. Discovered on the sky near the galactic center, where moving object detection is more difficult, 3I's appearance has led to massive efforts to obtain measurements for characterization. In this talk, instead of focusing on science results for 3I, which are ongoing and extensive, we will discuss some challenges of robotic surveying and followup for 3I and highlight some successes and failures.
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.