Antarctica Schmidt telescopes

The Antarctica Schmidt Telescopes project (also known as Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3)) is a joint project between Texas A&M University (TAMU) and the Beijing Astronomical Observatory to build three small (50cm aperture) wide-field telescopes at the Antarctic Kunlun Station near Dome A in Antarctica; Lifan Wang at TAMU is the main instigator of the project. [1] [2][3]

These telescopes will take advantage of the low background and the long Antarctic nights to provide high-accuracy photometric time series for finding extrasolar planets, and to observe wide fields in the infra-red to look for new supernovae.

The first of three Antarctic Survey Telescopes AST3-1, was installed at the Antarctic Kunlun Station in April 2012. 2nd and 3rd telescopes will be installed in 2013 and 2014 [4]

An update was published indicating that the first telescope operated for only a few weeks in 2012 before a power failure, and was repaired in 2013, but the CCD controller proceeded to fail after further data collection. The AST3-2 unit has seen several design revisions to improve reliability in the harsh Antarctic environment, and will be tested over the 2013-2014 winter in Mohe, China before being sent to the field.[5]

References

  1. ↑ "Antarctic Schmidt Telescopes".
  2. ↑ "China to build stronger telescope network in South Pole".
  3. ↑ http://mcba11.phys.unsw.edu.au/~plato/papers/yua12a.pdf
  4. ↑ http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/202936/7781043.html
  5. ↑ http://www.astronomy.scar.org/AAA2013/pdf/Shang.pdf
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 6/29/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.