Talk:Sentinel Space Telescope

In the News
BBC News. April 22, 2014: Asteroid impact risks 'underappreciated'. --BatteryIncluded (talk) 01:28, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

B612 no longer pursuing Sentinel because of Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, NeoCam and Synthetic Aperture Tracking
There's an update here on Geekwire. They've created a new "Asteroid Institute" run as a virtual institute, and they are now looking into Synthetic tracking which will let them find very small asteroids, and the "Asteroid Decision Analysis Machine" to help analyse the flood of data from next generation space surveys such as LSST. Another reason is because of NeoCam[http://neocam.ipac.caltech.edu/, a NASA project for a space infrared telescope which hopefully will fill some of the same gap in the data as Sentinel (though orbiting Earth not orbiting between Earth and Venus).

For aperture tracking see and

The idea is that instead of doing a 30 second exposure, you do many shorter 2 second exposures. With conventional CCDs that adds to the read noise so you get more errors but there are new CCDs developed for medical imaging that permit fast accurate reading, called Scientific CMOS detectors. The Andor Zyla is an example here. You can then use this to simulate tracking the asteroid with the camera, which makes the asteroid far brighter in the images. They found that fewer than eight of these cubesats, fitted with 15 centimeter synthetic tracking telescopes could find more than 70% of NEOs larger than 45 meters in diameter in less than six years. The total cost would be $50 million so a tenth of the cost of Sentinel.

So - I think the article needs to be updated to reflect this. Robert Walker (talk) 13:04, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Asteroid_impact_avoidance would also need to be updated Robert Walker (talk) 13:13, 17 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Minor point, sCMOS is not a kind of CCD; it is another kind of solid-state image sensor. A quick Google check does not show me that it has been used in astronomy. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:21, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

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