THE first of the asteroid-hunting is now on the lookout for threatening near-Earth objects, but its vision is impaired due to the US military.
From its perch atop the Haleakala volcano in Maui, Hawaii, PS1’s mammoth, 1400-megapixel camera should uncover 100,000 new asteroids and identify any that are on a collision course with Earth. However, the US air force, which funded the development of the telescope, requires that software automatically black out a swathe of pixels to hide the trajectories of passing satellites.
Last year this restriction, plus other shortcomings, meant that just 68 per cent of the total sky imaged produced usable pictures. As of March, improvements in image processing have boosted that figure to 76 per cent, says team member . Still, the asteroid hunters have had to add an extra set of observations for certain patches of sky to compensate for the possibility that an object might whizz by undetected.
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