ATLAS: A High-cadence All-sky Survey System

By J. Tonry, Larry Denneau, A. Heinze, B. Stalder, K. Smith, S. Smartt, C. Stubbs, H. Weiland, A. Rest. 2018

835 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Technology has advanced to the point that it is possible to image the entire sky every night and process the data in real time. The sky is hardly static: many interesting phenomena occur, including variable stationary objects such as stars or QSOs, transient stationary objects such as supernovae or M dwarf flares, and moving objects such as asteroids and the stars themselves. Funded by NASA, we have designed and built a sky survey system for the purpose of finding dangerous near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). This system, the “Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System” (ATLAS), has been optimized to produce the best survey capability per unit cost, and therefore is an efficient and competitive system for finding potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) but also for tracking variables and finding transients. While carrying out its NASA mission, ATLAS now discovers more bright (m < 19) supernovae candidates than any ground based survey, frequently detecting very young explosions due to its 2 day cadence. ATLAS discovered the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst independent of the high energy trigger and has released a variable star catalog of 5 × 106 sources. This is the first of a series of articles describing ATLAS, devoted to the design and performance of the ATLAS system. Subsequent articles will describe in more detail the software, the survey strategy, ATLAS-derived NEA population statistics, transient detections, and the first data release of variable stars and transient light curves.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/21f91e86dcc72ea83937dbc0e726b6286766c8c6

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. B. Metzger
2. J. Southworth
3. E. Berger
4. J. Winn
5. S. Smartt
6. D. Charbonneau
7. Sara Seager
8. G. Torres

Citations in the corpus

• TESS Eclipsing Binary Stars. I. Short-cadence Observations of 4584 Eclipsing Binaries in Sectors 1–26 (2021, background): “…WASP (Pollacco et al. 2006), HAT (Bakos et al. 2004, 2013), KELT (Pepper et al. 2007, 2012), and others46 Other surveys have been conducted to search for stellar variability, such as ASAS (Pojmanski 1997), ASAS-SN (Shappee et al. 2014), ATLAS (Tonry et al. 2018), and ZTF (Bellm et al. 2019).”
• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey (2022, methodology): “We obtained additional forced photometry of all 30 TDEs from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey using the ATLAS forced photometry service25 (Tonry et al. 2018; Smith et al. 2020).”
• The ATLAS All-Sky Stellar Reference Catalog (2018, methodology): “This paper is part of a series that describes the ATLAS project and its various components and data products, the first two being the system definition paper (Tonry et al. 2018) and the first variable star data release (Heinze et al. 2018).”
• The Cow: Discovery of a Luminous, Hot, and Rapidly Evolving Transient (2018, methodology): “OBSERVATIONS AND DATA ANALYSIS ATLAS is a twin 0.5-m telescope system installed on the Hawai’ian islands of Haleakala and Mauna Loa (Tonry et al. 2018).”
• The fast, luminous ultraviolet transient AT2018cow: extreme supernova, or disruption of a star by an intermediate-mass black hole? (2018, background): “The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS; Tonry et al. 2018) observes most of the visible Northern sky down to 19 mag every ∼ 2 nights.”