Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS)

Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System Latest News

A comet, officially designated 3I/ATLAS, originating from outside our solar system has been recently spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile.

About Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System

• It is an asteroid impact early warning system developed by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA. 
• It consists of four telescopes (2 in Hawaii, 1 in Chile, 1 in South Africa), which automatically scan the whole sky several times every night looking for moving objects.  
• Although the ATLAS system is also used to identify dwarf planets, supernova explosions, and life exposure remanence from a star being absorbed by a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy, the main purpose of this project is to search for large “killer asteroids” that may have a tremendous impact on life on earth. 
• ATLAS will provide a warning time depending on the size of the asteroid — larger asteroids can be detected further from Earth. 
• ATLAS will see a small (~20 meter) asteroid several days out, and a 100 meter asteroid several weeks out.
• The system is specially designed to detect objects that approach very close to Earth – closer than the distance to the Moon, about 240,000 miles or 384,000 kilometers away.

Source: FP

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