Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2021

32 JULY-AUGUST 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING these objects. The TBT project is a step in that direction,” says Ivo Sa- viane, the site manager for ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The project, which is a collaboration between the European Southern Ob- servatory (ESO) and the European Space Agency (ESA), “is a test-bed to demonstrate the capabilities needed to detect and follow-up near-Earth objects with the same telescope sys- tem,” says ESA’s Head of the Optical Technologies Section Clemens Heese, who is leading this project. The 56-cm telescope at ESO’s La Silla and TBT1, its identical counterpart ESA’s Test-Bed Telescope 2 installed at La Silla by ESO - Bárbara Ferreira P art of the world-wide effort to scan and identify near-Earth objects, the European Space Agency’s Test-Bed Telescope 2 (TBT2), a technology demonstrator hosted at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, has now started operating. Working alongside its northern-hemisphere partner telescope, TBT2 will keep a close eye on the sky for asteroids that could pose a risk to Earth, test- ing hardware and software for a fu- ture telescope network. “To be able to calculate the risk posed by poten- tially hazardous objects in the Solar System, we first need a census of