Discovering Dangerous Asteroids with Pan-STARRS1

Space applications produce and depend more and more on big volumes of data. LIST invites to a talk by Dr. Robert Jedicke from the  University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. Dr. Jedicke's talk will give an example on how asteroid detection and the processing of big data are related.

Abstract:

The Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, has been the leading discovery system for potentially hazardous asteroids for the past seven years.  The ambitious Pan-STARRS design process that began over fifteen years ago envisioned gigapixel cameras collecting terrabytes of data each night and accumulating petabytes of information over the course of its ten years of operations.  I will discuss the early design phases of this telescope system with a primary focus on the challenges involved in the Moving Object Processing Subsystem and provide some of the science highlights since the start of this decade.

Speaker:

Dr Jedicke has had professional careers in football, particle physics, astronomy, and software engineering. He received his PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Toronto, Canada.  After a brief try-out with the B.C. Lions in Vancouver he held post-doctoral positions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and at the University of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory where he worked on the Spacewatch near-Earth asteroid survey.

He spent more than five years at Veeco Corporation in Tucson, Arizona, developing image analysis software for interferometers before accepting a faculty position at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. He was the development manager of their Moving Object Processing System for the Pan-STARRS telescope on Maui that is now the world’s leading discovery system for asteroids and comets. 

His current research interests involve studies related to in-space resource utilization of asteroids to provide water as fuel for spacecraft missions.