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Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR): In cooperation with
the Air Force, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory has been operating a near-Earth
object discovery facility using a one-meter aperture GEODSS
telescope. 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 GEODSS
instruments used by the LINEAR program are located at the Lincoln
Laboratory's experimental test site in Socorro, New Mexico. Tests in early
1996 indicated that the search system, now known as LINEAR, had
considerable promise. In the period between March and July 1997, a
1024 x 1024 CCD pixel detector was used in field tests and, while this
CCD detector filled only about one fifth of the telescope's field of view,
four NEOs were discovered. In October 1997, a large format CCD
(1960 x 2560 pixels) that covered the telescope's 2 square degree
field of view was employed successfully to discover a total of 9 new
NEOs. Five more NEOs were added in the November 1997 through
January 1998 interval when both the small and large format CCD
detectors were employed. Beginning in October 1999, a second
one-meter telescope was added to the search effort.
In 2002, a third telescope of 0.5 meter aperature was brought on-line to provide follow-up observations for the
discoveries made by the two 1-meter search telescopes.
Currently, LINEAR
telescopes observe each patch of sky 5 times in one evening with most
of the efforts going into searching along the ecliptic plane where most
NEOs would be expected. The sensitivity of their CCDs, and particularly
their relatively rapid read out rates, allows LINEAR to cover large areas
of sky each night. Currently, the LINEAR program is responsible for the
majority of NEO discoveries.
Principal Investigator: Grant Stokes
Co-Investigators: Jenifer Evans and Eric Pearce
Look here for additional information on the LINEAR program:
http://www.ll.mit.edu/LINEAR/
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