Inner Solar System

It’s March 15th 2012, the official start date of the fourth Pan-STARRS Asteroid Search Campaign of the International Astronomical Search Collaboration. Students from 40 schools - most of them from the United States and Germany, but also from Brazil, Bulgaria, England, India, Poland, and Taiwan - are ready to go. During the last few weeks, they practiced how to search for asteroids in astronomical images. Now they will have the opportunity to work with data from the Pan-STARRS PS1 telescope - and to discover several previously unknown objects in our solar system for the next five weeks.

The International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC) is a cooperation of American universities, international observatories, and educational partners with the aim to give students worldwide access to astronomical research data. Since October 2010, the Pan-STARRS PS1 Science Consortium semi-annually provides sets of images from the PS1 telescope to IASC. These data are full of so far unknown asteroids yet to be discovered - a job that is assigned to the schools that - partnered in teams - participate in IASC’s asteroid search campaigns. For the students, this project is a unique experience. They have exclusive access to the newest data from a professional telescope, and they can use it to learn how to apply scientifc methods. Finally, they have the chance to be the first to spot a celestial body no one else has ever seen before.

At the Haus der Astronomie in Heidelberg, I coordinate a growing network of German teachers who participate in the IASC campaigns with their students. We set up a Yahoo group where teachers and students can discuss problems or their findings with the other German-speaking groups. I also created German versions of the IASC manuals, and the Haus der Astronomie provides supplementary German-language educational material that the teachers can use in class to complement the asteroid search campaigns.

March 19th. Images taken on March 16th by the PS1 telescope are finally processed for the schools. The students download them, and, using the software Astrometrica, they search for moving objects and measure their positions on the sky. They report their findings to IASC, where the data is cross-checked with the results of Pan-STARRS’ automated search. And they are quite successful: The eight German schools supported by the Haus der Astronomie alone spotted a total number of 44 new asteroids. But for some of the students, just having discovery candidates is not enough. They want to do their own follow-up observations, in order to recover as many of their findings as possible.

Asteroid 2011 WC1 re-observed with Faulkes Telescopes after it was discovered by LGL student Julia Schnepf during the fall 2011 IASC Pan-STARRS asteroid search campaign.

The discovery of an asteroid is a three-step process: An initial candidate must be confirmed by further observations in order to get designated by the Minor Planet Center (MPC). The asteroid will finally be numbered when it can be monitored for several oppositions, a procedure that typically takes several years. And not till then, the discoverers are officially credited and are allowed to name it. Especially for the second step, follow-up observations are essential. This work is usually done by IASC astronomers, but my aim is to widen the project and to involve the students themselves in this process.

One of the German schools participating in the Pan-STARRS asteroid search campaigns is the Lessing-Gymnasium Lampertheim (LGL), which has a focus on natural sciences and is a member of the German STEM network MINT-EC. Since 2010, the LGL participates in a pilot project with the Faulkes Telescope Project (FT)in Germany, which started in 2004 with the focus on the coordination of asteroid observations. 650 positions of 115 asteroids have been measured and reported to the MPC until 2005; three asteroids have been discovered and designated, two of them have been numbered and named by students. Additional activities include photometry of the eclipsing binary asteroid (4492) Debussy. In the framework of this project, the LGL has access to the 2-meter telescopes of FT, which are perfectly suited for follow-up observations of the Pan-STARRS asteroids, which are typically fainter than magnitude 20. During the October 2011 IASC Pan-STARRS campaign, I therefore initiated a project together with teacher Martin Metzendorf and Lothar Kurtze from the German FT team, where students aged 12 to 17 plan and perform follow-up observations of the asteroids discovered during the Pan-STARRS campaign within regular physics classes or at the astronomy club of the LGL.

Doing their own observations provides the ultimate hands-on experience for the students. Telescope time at FT is booked in advance, but for reasonable follow-up observations, their candidates must be caught within the next few days after their initial discovery. So first of all, the students learn how important it is to be as fast as possible with the analysis of their Pan-STARRS data. They can use the position measurements of their own Pan-STARRS discoveries or data from the other groups to calculate a preliminary ephemeris of these asteroids with MPC tools. This way, coordinates where the telescope should be pointed at for recovery can be predicted. Additionally, observing with FT means that the students themselves are responsible for controlling the telescope and its camera. Subsequently, they analyse the obtained images like they did for the Pan-STARRS data. Finally, the positions they measure for the recovered asteroids are checked by the FT team and sent to the MPC.

Something else happens on March 19th. The PS1 telescope itself points at the same region of the sky it did three nights ago, thus matching the images the students got. As a result, the schools supported by the Haus der Astronomie can celebrate the confirmation of 12 of their candidates already during the first week of the Pan-STARRS campaign - what an outstanding start.

Nevertheless, the LGL students are well-prepared. On April 3rd they started their follow-up observations with FT during this campaign, and already during their first run, they were able to recover two candidates. Additionally, they plan to monitor the designated asteroids discovered by German schools during previous campaigns in order to get them numbered.

The new @PS1NEOwatch feed tweets when PS1 finds a new Near Earth Object

From today onwards you can see tweets of new Near Earth Objects identified by Pan-STARRS1. Follow @PS1NEOwatch for updates of new PS1 NEOs. If you want to know more about how PS1 finds asteroids then why not check out the following blog posts.

MOPS: Finding things that go bump in the night where Larry describes how advanced software helps Pan-STARRS identify rocks that could come very close to the Earth.

School students find hundreds of potential new asteroids with PS1 where Will Burgett outlines work being done by school students across the globe to identify new asteroids.

Comets and asteroids have classically been considered to be two distinctly different types of objects. Both are considered “small solar system bodies”, too small to be considered planets, but large enough to be tracked individually as they travel through the solar system. Asteroids are typically thought of as inert chunks of rock or metal that are mostly found on roughly circular, flat orbits (compared to those of the major planets) in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, where we believed they formed (and where we therefore believe they’ve been since the formation of the solar system). Comets, on the other hand, are thought of as “dirty snowballs” that travel along often highly elongated orbits that take them from the cold, distant outer solar system to the warm inner solar system where we usually observe them. They are believed to originate in the one of two distant reservoirs of frozen, icy bodies: the Kuiper Belt just outside the orbit of Neptune, and the far more distant Oort Cloud. Occasionally, a collision or the slight gravitational tug of a passing star sends one of these bodies Sun-ward into the inner solar system, where the object’s ice heats up and sublimates (turns from solid to gas), ejecting gas and dust which we observe as the familiar fuzzy haze that
surrounds the core, or nucleus, of the comet, and often also in the form of a cometary tail.

Comets have been able to preserve their icy content over the 4.6 billion year life of the solar system because they have spent most of their lives stored in the cold outer solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. Meanwhile, if asteroids ever contained ice (and there is evidence that indicates some did once contain ice, albeit in the distant past), they are believed to be mostly baked dry by now by the much higher temperatures in the main asteroid belt. Recent research has been challenging this traditionally-held picture though.

The first main-belt comet, an object that had an orbit like a main-belt asteroid but had the appearance of a comet, was discovered in 1996. The thought that an object orbiting so close to the Sun could still have enough surviving ice to power cometary activity, however, was initially so disturbing to astronomers that many believed that what they had witnessed was the result of an impact tossing dust up into space. Observations six years later, however, showed that cometary activity had returned. This discovery all but ruled out the impact hypothesis for driving the activity since two random impacts on the same asteroid would be required in an
extraordinarily short period of time. Comets, however, routinely exhibit recurrent activity, as temperature changes as their orbits take them closer to and then farther away from the Sun make them warmer and then colder, turning sublimation on and off in predictable ways. Main-belt comets have much more circular orbits and as such do not go through temperature swings as severe as other comets, and so we suspect that their activity may be instead be controlled by seasonal effects caused by the tilt of their rotational poles (as compared to their orbits) in the exact same way that seasons with widely varying temperatures are caused on Earth.

Main-belt comets have much to tell us about the true composition of the asteroid belt, which in turn will help us to understand the formation of our own solar system, and therefore the conditions that might need to be present for similar solar systems to form around other stars. In the case of Earth in particular, main-belt comets may be the key to understanding a particularly vexing problem, that of discovering the origin of our water. Due to its close proximity to the Sun, the Earth is thought to have been too warm to be able to accumulate much water as it was forming, and likely accumulated most of its water from impacts from objects from colder parts of the solar system. Comets from the outer solar system were once considered good candidates for playing this role as water deliverers, but recent studies have suggested that main-belt objects may have played a much larger role than previously thought. The discovery that ice still remains in the asteroid belt in main-belt comets gives us a present-day opportunity to probe this potential ancient water source, and as such, is of great interest to astronomer.

The extremely recent discovery of the main-belt comets (first discovered in 1996, but not recognized as a new class of objects until 2006 when the discoveries of two
more were announced) means that we still have much to learn about them. At the moment, just five such objects are known, meaning that at the moment, a high priority
is to discover more so that we can begin to understand the extent and diversity of the population of these strange objects. How many are there in total? Are they
confined to particular parts of the asteroid belt? Luckily for astronomers interested in these questions, this is one area where Pan-STARRS is expected to help. By
surveying the sky repeatedly and being able to detect fainter objects than previous surveys, we expect that Pan-STARRS should be able to discover many more main-belt comets. To do so, we require sophisticated techniques to sift through the mountains of Pan-STARRS data generated each night to automatically select potential comets for further inspection by humans. Since the start of the Pan-STARRS survey, these techniques have been undergoing refinements to optimize their comet-finding effectiveness and have now reached the point where Pan-STARRS has been credited with the discovery of four comets this year (three of them just in the last 2 months including C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) ). None of these have so far turned out to be main-belt comets, but as comet discoveries start to become more routine, we hope it’s just a matter of time!

Even before Pan-STARRS makes its first main-belt comet discovery, it is already assisting research on known main-belt comets. A new paper submitted to the Astronomical Journal earlier this week describes a worldwide observational campaign to study the most recently discovered main-belt comet named P/2010 R2 (La Sagra), or P/La Sagra for short. Pan-STARRS actually recorded the first known observations of this object, about a month before its official discovery, but unfortunately, it escaped our detection software at the time and was not found in our data until after it was discovered by others. Nonetheless, early Pan-STARRS observations of the comet played a key role in the monitoring of its activity over the year-long series of observations that we present in this new paper. In particular, these observations show the comet becoming steadily brighter over a period of months, strong evidence for ongoing dust emission, a characteristic signature of cometary activity, and confirmation that this object is indeed a true main-belt comet.

While an exciting start, we of course hope that this paper will not be the last that Pan-STARRS has to say about main-belt comets. Stay tuned…

You’ve seen the Hollywood movie version, an astronomer looks through the eyepiece of a telescope (it’s always got an eyepiece), scribbles some calculations on a piece of paper and, with a look of horror flashing across his face, realizes that this is the one, the deadly asteroid that’s going to hit the Earth. In reality discovering asteroids that may threaten the Earth is nowhere near as sensational. But it is somewhat more complicated than and equally as fascinating as the movie version.

Pan-STARRS1’s 7.0 square degree field of view makes it an excellent tool for finding objects moving around our own solar system. Part of PS1’s mission is to discover and catalog these hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs) and their even more dangerous cousins, potentially-hazardous objects (PHOs). NEOs have orbits that bring them within 0.3 AU (about 45m km) of Earth’s orbit, while PHOs have orbital paths that bring them within 0.05 AU (~7.5m km) of Earth’s orbit and are at least 150m in diameter, large enough to cause extensive damage if one were to collide with the Earth.

To cope with the volume of asteroid data that PS1 and an eventual Pan-STARRS 4 (PS4) would need to handle, the Pan-STARRS project devised its own asteroid-finding software, called MOPS: the Moving Object Processing System. MOPS has been under development for about 6 years, and has proven adept at finding NEOs in Pan-STARRS data and in managing its own catalog of newly discovered and known asteroids beside NEOs so that PS1 scientists can do solar system science.

ASTEROIDS

Potentially Hazardous Object ST3 shown moving between two Pan-STARRS images.

By far the largest population of asteroids known lie in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter. There are currently about 500,000 known Main Belt Objects (MBOs), a number that increases by a few thousand each month. Occasionally an MBO travels close enough to Jupiter that Jupiter alters the MBO’s orbit so that the MBO transitions to a different orbit. This can be a much more elliptical orbit that sends the MBO well into the inner solar system. If this new orbit brings the MBO close to the Earth’s orbit, it is classified as an NEO. Asteroids range from as large as 950 km in diameter for Ceres (the first asteroid discovered) down to as small as a bus or even a basketball. The smaller asteroids are much more numerous though — while a 1-km asteroid might hit the Earth every million years, a rock the size of a basketball collides with the Earth about once a day.

HOW MOPS FIND ASTEROIDS

Asteroids are first discovered as star-like dots moving between astronomical images taken at the same place on the sky. On short time scales, say less than a day, most asteroids move in a fairly straight line. MOPS uses special spatial-searching software to detect asteroid candidates by playing a large game of dot-to-dot with the millions of star-like sources found in PS1 imagery. PS1′s image processing pipeline (IPP) automatically removes stars, which aren’t moving, so MOPS has the job of trying to find straight-moving combinations of sources in the remaining “transient data” catalogs. We call these nightly associations of asteroid detections tracklets. A large part of the task of finding tracklets is dealing with false sources — star-like image features that come from image artifacts, cosmic rays and random fluctuations in the pixel data. Each night, MOPS scans its transient catalogs for asteroid candidate trackelts, and an IfA scientist confirms real asteroids in each nightly list of candidates.

PS1′s survey designed so that asteroids can be discovered while meeting other science objectives. For example, the PS1 “3π” all-sky survey always obtains images in pairs, so that we can tell if a star-like source is in fact an asteroid because we see it moving between two or more images. About 85% of PS1′s survey time can be used to discover asteroids.

ASTEROID ORBITS

From a single night of observations MOPS cannot determine the complete orbital description of an asteroid. Note that while an asteroid has a straightforward elliptical motion through the solar system, its motion on the sky can be rather complicated due to projection effects. Also, from initial observations we cannot tell how far away an asteroid is from us — we only know its brightness, which can vary according to size and distance. So a faint asteroid might be small or far away; we can’t tell at first.

In order to compute a full six-parameter orbit which describes an asteroid’s motion through the solar system, we need multiple nights of observations of an object, then employ a computational procedure called orbit determination. PS1 uses software provided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — the same software used to guide spacecraft through the rings of Saturn! — and the OrbFit Consortium to fit orbits of solar system bodies to PS1 observations.

FINDING NEOS

Discovering NEOs is even more challenging because they can be found all over the sky, often moving quickly. Unlike main-belt asteroids, which are mostly a similar distance from the sun (2-3 AU) and lie in the plane of the solar system, causing them to appear in a “stripe” on the sky, NEOs can be whizzing by quite close to us and can therefore be projected anywhere on the sky. Repeated PS1 detections of these objects can be quite far apart, and making the dot-to-dot associations more difficult. Because PS1′s survey is largely preprogrammed, PS1 cannot always “chase” fast-moving NEOs to obtain repeated observations. So when we discover a candidate NEO tracklet, we submit the observations to the IAU Minor Planet Center, which maintains lists of NEO candidates that need additional observations. PS1, with its wide field, excels at finding initial observations of new NEOs, but prompt follow-up requires worldwide teamwork and cooperation.

Diagram of the solar system seen from above, showing orbits of NEOs discovered by PS1. Click for large version.

PS1 DISCOVERIES

To date PS1 has discovered 85 new NEOs, two comets, and about 4000 main-belt asteroids. PS1 has also submitted observations for over 200,000 known asteroids — nearly half of all known asteroids! This is an important contribution because PS1′s position measurements are so precise that they substantially improve the accuracy of orbits for known asteroids, allowing us to know their positions even better. Here are some highlights of PS1 discoveries:

2010 ST3. PS1′s first NEO discovery from September 2010.

2011 BT15. An especially hazardous NEO, since we cannot yet rule out an impact in the future between years 2037-2110. JPL maintains a list of still-worrisome asteroids at their risk page.

C/2011 L4. Long-period comet on its way toward the sun from the icy reaches of the outer solar system. This object should be visible to the naked eye in early 2013. PS1SC scientist Richard Wainscoat has more information about C/2011 L4 in another blog post.

OTHER SOLAR SYSTEM SCIENCE

There’s alot more to the solar system than just NEOs and MBOs though. PS1SC scientist Darin Raggozine posted a great summary of outer solar system research, and there’s currently research into newly discovered main-belt comets, “contact binary” asteroids that are fused together, and asteroid impacts. When there’s exciting news to report you can be sure to find it on the PS1SC blog.

The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope has discovered a new comet that is expected to be visible to the naked eye in early 2013. The comet is now about 1.2 billion km from the sun, beyond the orbit of Jupiter. It is currently about magnitude 18.5 making it 100,000 times too faint to be seen with the naked eye meaning it can only be observed with a telescope and a sensitive electronic detector. The predicted geometry of the comet’s approach to the sun is not ideal – it will pass behind the sun, on the opposite side of the sun to Earth. This will make viewing the comet difficult. The comet has a highly inclined orbit, and will approach the Earth and Sun from the south, then move into the northern sky after perihelion (its closest approach to the Sun). In March 2013, the comet is expected to be visible low in the western sky after sunset, but the bright twilight sky may make it difficult to view. The comet is predicted to reach approximately magnitude 1 near perihelion meaning it will be of the same brightness as some of the brighter stars in the sky. However its close proximity to the Sun will make viewing difficult.

Comet C/2011 L4 moving across the sky. Credit PS1SC/Henry Hsieh

Pan-STARRS 1 is a 1.8-meter-diameter telescope equipped with the largest digital camera in the world (1.4 billion pixels). Each image is almost 3 gigabytes in size, and the camera takes an image approximately every 45 seconds. Each night, the telescope images more than 1,000 square degrees of the night sky (an area 5,000 times the size of the full moon). The comet was found while searching the sky for potentially hazardous asteroids—ones that may someday hit Earth. Software engineer Larry Denneau, with help from astronomers Robert Jedicke, Mikael Granvik, Tommy Grav and Richard Wainscoat designed software that searches each image taken by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope for moving objects. Denneau, and UH astronomers Henry Hsieh and Jan Kleyna also wrote other software that searches the moving objects for comets’ tell-tale fuzzy appearance. The comet was identified by this automated software.

The comet is named C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS). Comets are usually named after their discoverers, but in this case, because a large team, including observers, computer scientists, and astronomers, was involved, the comet is named after the telescope. This is the second comet discovered by Pan-STARRS 1. The first comet, P/2010 T2 (PANSTARRS) is a Jupiter Family Comet that will never become bright enough to see without the aid of a telescope.

C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) was found on the night of June 5-6, and we confirmed it the following night using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea. We have just found precovery images from the night of May 20-21, and using positional measurements from those images, calculate that the comet will reach perihelion around March 10, 2013, with a perihelion distance of 0.30 AU, or about 45 million km or 30% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and inside the orbit of the planet Mercury. The comet’s orbit may be parabolic meaning this may be the first time it has come close to the Sun, and it may never return. This is because we estimate that it has an eccentricity (a measure of how non-circular the orbit is) close to 1. It will not be known for several months whether the orbit is elliptical (with eccentricity less than 1), which would mean that it is a returning comet. Over the next few months, we will continue to study the comet, and this will allow better predictions of how bright it will eventually get. Predicting the brightness of comets is notoriously difficult, with numerous past comets failing to reach their expected brightness. The difficulty in making brightness predictions lies in the fact that for new comets, astronomers do not know in advance how much ice they contain. Because sublimation of ice (conversion from solid to gas) is the source of cometary activity and a major contributor to a comet’s overall eventual brightness, this means that more accurate brightness predictions will not be possible until the comet becomes more active as it approaches the sun, and astronomers get a better idea of how icy it is.

C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) most likely originated in the Oort cloud, a cloud of comet-like objects located in the distant outer solar system. It was probably gravitationally disturbed by a distant passing star, sending it on a long journey toward the sun. Comets like C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) offer astronomers a rare opportunity to look at pristine material left over from the early formation of the solar system.

One of the many exciting aspects of being involved in the Pan-STARRS PS1 survey is the potential to utilize its data products for education and public outreach purposes (EPO). Members of the PS1SC have recently completed some extremely successful work with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration to allow high school students in Germany, Texas, and Hawaii an opportunity to use images collected by PS1 to make asteroid discoveries. This first “pilot project” of 10 schools will be expanded to about 30 schools in a second “campaign” to be conducted during Spring 2011, and eventually the expansion could reach several hundred or even a thousand schools (thousands of students). And because of the vast amount of data produced by the wide field PS1 images, it requires only a handful of images to support such a large number of schools. For me the most gratifying part of bringing asteroid searches into the classroom is the high enthusiasm expressed by both the students and their teachers for participating in this program.

For the past few months we have teamed up the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, designed to become one of the world’s most powerful asteroid hunters, with school students from the USA and Germany to discover and study asteroids – clumps of rock, between a couple and a few hundred kilometers in size, that cruise through our Solar System. At the close of the campaign, which was coordinated by the International Astronomical Search Collaboration, the students can look back on exciting eight weeks of asteroid search, which included the confirmation of four “Near-Earth Objects” (asteroids passing relatively close to Earth) and the discovery of what could turn out to be more than 170 previously undiscovered asteroids.

Asteroid 2010 UR7, confirmed as a Near Earth Object by students at Gymnasium Neckargemünd near Heidelberg. The object is indicated by the white box and appears as a faint streak as it moves through the solar system so fast it is blurred out in even a 40s image! Credit: PS1SC

As the 1.8 meter (71-inch) Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (PS1), one of the most powerful current survey telescopes, scans the night sky, its 1400 Megapixel digital camera takes more than 500 exposures per night. Between October 25 and December 21, 2010, a small fraction of these data found its way into classrooms in the USA and in Germany, where high-school students have used it to track known asteroids, and also to discover candidate objects that could be previously unknown asteroids. When Hawaiian skies were overcast, schools also received data taken with a telescope operated by the Astronomical Research Institute (ARI) in Westfield, Illinois.

Over the Internet, the participating schools received series of astronomical images. Each series included images of one specific region of the sky, taken an hour apart. During this hour, the image of a main belt asteroid (one lying between Mars and Jupiter) would have moved noticeably (in the images in question: about 100 pixels) relative to the distant background stars. The students examined the images for exactly this kind of position change, carefully sorting image artifacts from moving celestial objects, and reported back to the International Astronomical Search Collaboration, whose volunteers then checked the results and arranged for follow-up observations.

Some of the most interesting student observations during the project concerned “Near-Earth Objects” (NEO), asteroids or similar objects whose orbits bring them into the inner Solar System. Some NEOs might turn out to be potential “killer asteroids” that are bound to collide with our home planet; finding these is one main goal of the PS1 telescope. In order to keep track of NEOs, at least two separate observations at different times are required. Katharina Stöckler (age 17), an 11th grade student at Gymnasium Neckargemünd near Heidelberg, explains:

“We obtained a ‘NEO confirmation’ for the asteroid 2010 UR7 – the second observation ever made of that object, which confirmed the asteroid’s existence and gave crucial information about its orbit.”

Three additional such “NEO confirmations” were made during the project; in addition, 64 of the students’ observations amounted to the third or fourth time a specific NEO had been observed. All these observations provide important additional data to scientists studying the motion of NEOs.

In the course of the project, the students also observed 151 candidate objects in the Pan-STARRS data (plus an additional 20 candidates in the ARI/Westfield telescope data) that could be newly discovered main belt asteroids, which orbit the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In one case, students from Benedikt Stattler Gymnasium, a high-school in Bavaria, Germany, discovered 7 such candidate objects in a single night! Before the students’ finds are confirmed as discoveries, however, and assigned provisional designation numbers, they will need to be observed again – for a number of the candidates, this is going to prove impossible; on the other hand, some are likely to turn out to have been previously known, after all. Once a newly found object has been observed over at least a whole orbit (which typically lasts 3 to 6 years), it is assigned a definite numerical identifier, and can also be given a proper name.

IASC director Dr. Patrick Miller, of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, says:

“Pan-STARRS images contain an amazing amount of data, providing students with opportunities for literally hundreds of new discoveries. With this amount of data, we could expand our campaign to a thousand schools a year, and tens of thousands of students, which is very exciting, and is an unbelievable opportunity for high schools and colleges!”

It is incredibly exciting that we can use a state-of-the-art system such as Pan-STARRS to allow students around the world to learn astronomy with real research quality images. We hope we’ve made this a valuable and enjoyable experience for both the students and their teachers. Hopefully this is only the first step in eventually involving as many as a thousand schools around the world.

If you’re interested in your school getting involved please email me at burgett AT ifa.hawaii.edu

More information can be found in this press release:

“Successful hunt for asteroids in the classroom”
Dr. Markus Pössel, Center for Astronomy Education and Outreach
Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy

The participating international teams of schools were:

1. Luitpold-Gymnasium, Munich, Germany
Ranger High School, Ranger, Texas

2. Christoph-Probst-Gymnasium, Munich, Germany
May High School, May, Texas

3. Benediktinergymnasium Ettal, Germany
Vernon High School, Vernon, Texas

4. Benedikt-Stattler-Gymnasium, Bad Kötzting, Germany
Bullard High School, Bullard, Texas

5. Werdenfels-Gymnasium, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
Colleyville Heritage High School, Colleyville, Texas

6. St. Anna-Gymnasium, Munich, Germany
El Campo High School, El Campo, Texas

7. Helmholtz-Gymnasium, Heidelberg, Germany
Tarrant County College, Hurst, Texas

8. Gymnasium Neckargemünd, Neckargemünd, Germany
Brookhaven College, Farmers Branch, Texas

9. Lessing-Gymnasium, Lampertheim, Germany
Madisonville High School, Madisonville, Texas, and Baldwin High School, Wailuku, Hawaii

10. Life Science Lab, Heidelberg, Germany
Collin County College, Plano, Texas