Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2021

JULY-AUGUST 2021 I n this picture, an engineer reaches out of the white telescope dome towards the black structure of the Test-Bed Telescope 2, a European Space Agency tele- scope hosted at ESO’s La Silla observatory, as it is lowered into place by crane. The dome is designed to protect the telescope from the harsh conditions of the Atacama Desert in Chile. [P. Sinclaire/ESO] located at the ESA’s deep-space ground station at Cebreros in Spain, will act as precursors to the planned ‘Flyeye’ telescope network, a sepa- rate project that ESA is developing to survey and track fast-moving ob- jects in the sky. This future network will be entirely robotic; software will perform real-time scheduling of ob- servations and, at the end of the day, it will report the positions and other information about the objects detected. The TBT project is de- signed to show that the software and hardware work as expected. “The start of observations of TBT2 at La Silla will enable the observing sys- tem to work in its intended two- telescope configuration, finally ful- filling the project’s objectives,” says Heese. While seriously harmful asteroid im- pacts on Earth are extremely rare, they are not inconceivable. The Earth has been periodically bom- barded with both large and small as- teroids for billions of years, and the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor event, which caused some 1600 injuries, most due to flying splinters and bro- ken glass, further raised the public’s awareness of the threat posed by near-Earth objects. Larger objects do more damage, but are thankfully easier to spot and the orbits of known large asteroids are already thoroughly studied. However, it is estimated that there are large num- bers of smaller, yet-undiscovered ob- jects we are unaware of that could do serious damage if they were to hit a populated area. That’s where TBT and the future planned network of Flyeye tele- scopes come in. Once fully opera- tional the network’s design would allow it to survey the night sky to track fast-moving objects, a signifi- cant advancement in Europe’s capac- ity to spot potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. TBT is part of an ongoing inter-or- ganisational effort to build a more complete picture of these objects and the potential risks they pose. This project builds on ESO’s previous involvement in protecting the Earth from potentially dangerous near- Earth objects. Both ESO and ESA are active in the United Nations-en-