Pint-Size Sky Watchers
While monster telescopes get the attention, the little guys quietly — and cheaply — rack up cosmic finds.
- By Damond Benningfield
- Air & Space magazine, November 2012
HATSouth telescopes search for dim planets orbiting the stars in Chile’s Atacama desert sky. Gáspár Bakos
The Hungarian-born Princeton astronomer is doing a bit of repair work on an overcast spring afternoon in Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains, poking into an electronics box that controls one of five small telescopes he oversees at the Smithsonian’s Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory near Amado, 35 miles south of Tucson. The cluster of telescopes forms most of HATNet, the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope Network, which hunts for planets in other star systems. Two more telescopes are in Hawaii, and a second network, HATSouth, spreads from Namibia to Chile to Australia. Together, these little telescopes are able to search wide swaths of the sky to make voluminous catalogs of cosmic objects.
Bakos is in Arizona because the top of one of the box-shaped telescope enclosures refuses to open. To keep the remotely operated telescopes running, he sometimes travels 100,000 miles a year. His journeys bring him close to the many varied objects of the universe, not to mention a menagerie of creatures on this planet as well.
“One time this telescope had a black widow inside,” Bakos recalls, jabbing his finger at the spot in the Whipple telescope where he found the nasty visitor. “Namibia has snakes. They’ve never gotten into the telescopes, but they’re all over the place. This site [in Arizona] has the sun spider, which is as bad as a scorpion. It has a gigantic mouth, which is really scary, with a lot of teeth in it.”
For those who operate small telescope networks, there’s no such thing as “not my job.” “It’s like working at a small business, because if something needs to be done, you do it,” says Ed Beshore, who recently left his post as head of the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, which hunts for asteroids and comets that come close to Earth’s orbit, to become deputy principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx, a NASA asteroid sample-return mission scheduled to launch in 2016. “I’ve swept the floors at the observatory, I’ve ripped the telescope apart and pulled the mirrors out and pulled the cameras off, I’ve written software, and I’ve written grant proposals.”
Networks of small telescopes are contributing to science in ways most astronomers couldn’t have envisioned just a couple of decades ago. They have increased by 60 times the number of known asteroids in the solar system, discovered several dozen extrasolar planets, cataloged thousands of exploding stars, and helped solve some of the mysteries of the most powerful blasts in the universe.
Though they’re called “networks,” the telescopes aren’t wired together; they’re just a collection of instruments that are all assigned the same task. These telescopes are generally 40 inches in diameter or smaller, and by working in groups they are especially suited to record changes in large areas of the sky over periods of days, weeks, or even years. “Historically, we’ve always gone deeper—to the very edges of the universe, or nearby but very faint, and that’s the role of giant telescopes,” says David Charbonneau, a Harvard astronomer and lead scientist for MEarth, another Whipple-based project, which uses a set of eight identical 16-inch telescopes to hunt for planets around small, cool stars known as M dwarfs. “But the time domain has been neglected,” he says. “The idea of studying stars and seeing how they change is fairly new,” enabled over the past couple of decades by the advent of these small, wide-field-of-view telescope networks.
More: http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Pint-Size-Sky-Watchers-169363506.html
Source: Air & Space Smithsonian Magazine.
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