World’s Largest Digital Camera Tracks Asteroids

[n2doc]

December will bring us the first in a set of four asteroid-tracking telescopes. With the help of the world’s largest digital camera this piece of modern technology will scan large portions of the sky in search of asteroids and other near-Earth objects.Each telescope is equipped with a 1.4 billion pixel digital camera capable of taking highly detailed photos of the night sky. The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System or Pan-STARRS project aims to scan the sky from high on top of Mount Haleakala in Maui Island, Hawaii. Three times a month they will be searching for asteroids and other NEOs ( near-Earth objects ) starting from sizes as small as 300 meters in diameter. Pan-STARRS is going to have at a minimum three times the collecting power of today’s NEO telescopes.


Each of the cameras in the project consists of charge-coupled devices or CCDs arranged in a 40 centimeter square array.

The maker of the cameras, Barry Burke, who is also a senior staff member at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory said that the most innovative aspect of the CCD is it’s ability to electronically shift an image to counteract atmospheric blur and deliver clearer astrophotography.

“The atmosphere is the limit to the quality of the image, but there is a special feature of these chips that allows them to remove some of the blur due to atmospheric effects, it allows the image to be shifted in any direction in the chip in a way that matches the motion of the stars and that takes out a significant part of the blur.” he said.

The orthogonal transfer CCD or OTCCD is a technology that electronically adjusts an image instead of doing it mechanically by tilting a camera’s lens or mirror. The same technique is used in consumer cameras with image stabilization. Distributing the technology to each cell of the CCD array allows for a more granular adjustment to localized atmospheric turbulence, resulting in a sharper image.

more:
http://devicedaily.com/misc/worlds-largest-digital-camera-tracks-asteroids.html