Hunting Asteroids with Big Telescopes

Dr. Lynne Jones, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Astronomers all over the world have been hunting asteroids with a wide variety of telescopes and cameras for the last 50 years. While many of these asteroids orbit the Sun fairly far from Earth, some of them travel closer, close enough to be called Near Earth Asteroids. So far, we have discovered almost 15,000 Near Earth Asteroids, with sizes ranging from about a 1 meter (a few feet) up to 32 km (almost 20 miles). In the next five years, a new survey telescope - the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) - will be coming online. Using this new telescope, we expect to discover and study around 100,000 Near Earth Asteroids.

Dr. Lynne Jones is the Performance Scientist for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) at the University of Washington and currently co-chair of the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration. She was part of the Survey/Detection panel of the 2010 NRC Committee to Review Near-Earth-Object Survey and Hazard Mitigation Strategies. As part of her work with LSST, Dr Jones evaluates the scientific performance of LSST observing strategies, including the potential for studying small bodies with this next-generation telescope. She received her PhD from University of Michigan, conducting surveys to discover some of the faintest known (at the time) TransNeptunian Objects.