Digital camera Zyla

astronomydetectionmonitoring

Impacts from Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), such as meteoroids, asteroids, or comets, can be a threat to Earth, artificial satellites, and spacecraft. It is therefore important to determine their size and assess how numerous they are. A technique to investigate the size-frequency distribution of NEOs is the so-called Lunar Monitoring Method. This method is based on observations and detections of faint light flashes on the Moon’s surface caused by NEO impacts. Recently, the ESA-funded lunar monitoring project “NELIOTA”(1) (NEO Lunar Impacts and Optical TrAnsients), which features two Zyla 5.5 sCMOS cameras from Andor, an Oxford Instruments company, reported the successful detection of 31 NEO impact flashes in the project’s first year of observations(2). To date, the number of detected NEO impacts increased to 55. The monitoring campaign, now being extended to January 2021, has been performing observations since February 2017 with the recently updated and ground-based 1.2m Kryoneri telescope of the National Observatory of Athens (NOA). NELIOTA is the first project to use a 1 meter class telescope for lunar observations, capable of detecting impact flashes about 2 magnitudes fainter than other smaller-aperture monitoring telescopes. In addition, the telescope’s twin camera system called “Lunar imager” offers simultaneous observations of the Moon’s surface in two optical photometric bands, allowing researchers to determine the temperature of each impact flash(3). Furthermore, NELIOTA is one of the pioneer astronomy projects to use sCMOS detectors for their observations.