Bibcode
Licandro, Javier; Tonry, John; Alarcon, Miguel R.; Nichita, Pavel; Serra-Ricart, Miquel; Denneau, Larry
Bibliographical reference
EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2025 (EPSC-DPS2025
Advertised on:
9
2025
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
We present the first results from ATLAS-Teide, the new unit of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) installed by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) at the Teide Observatory (Tenerife, Spain) in January 2025. ATLAS-Teide is part of the IAC's "Strategic Plan of the Canarian Observatories," supported by projects EQC2021-007122-P and ICT2022-007828, both funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU. The system operates within the global ATLAS network (https://atlas.fallingstar.com/) under a collaborative agreement between the IAC and the University of Hawaii, covering both operations and scientific use. ATLAS, developed by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA, is an early warning system for asteroid impacts. The network currently includes four 50 cm Wright-Schmidt telescopes located in Hawaii, Chile, and South Africa. Each unit surveys a quarter of the night sky, imaging each field four times per night with a limiting magnitude of V ~ 19.5. The system is designed to detect small (~20 m) asteroids days before potential impact and larger (~100 m) objects weeks in advance. ATLAS-Teide, the 5th ATLAS unit, features a new, cost-effective, modular design based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Each module includes four Celestron RASA 11 telescopes mounted on a PlaneWave L550 equatorial Direct Drive mount, equipped with QHY600PRO CMOS cameras covering a shared field. A single module achieves the performance of a 56 cm aperture telescope, with a 7.5 deg² field of view and a plate scale of 1.26 arcsec/pixel. A prototype module (ATLAS-P) was deployed at Teide in November 2022 to test hardware, the new developed control and data reduction software, and system integration, successfully meeting all performance criteria during its 2023 trial run. The full ATLAS-Teide facility consists of four such modules housed in a roll-off roof observatory. Together, they replicate the survey capability of the existing ATLAS units, covering approximately 6000 deg² four times per night with 30-second exposures. The system is currently finalizing commissioning and has already begun contributing high-cadence observations, reporting astrometry for thousands of asteroids each night, including 10-20 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). During a total of 16 commissioning nights, ATLAS-Teide submitted 171,552 individual detections corresponding to 27,081 unique asteroids and 77 NEOs. This performance highlights the success of the modular approach and establishes ATLAS-Teide as a powerful new asset for global asteroid impact monitoring. ATLAS-Teide telescopes ready to start observations at Teide Observatory inside its roll-off dome Detection of NEA (68287) 2001 FL24 at V=19.5 with ATLAS MOPS software