News Media Tip - July 23, 2001

Students Join Amateur in Search for Space Rocks

How would you go about scanning the night sky in search of asteroids? Two students are finding out first hand that discovering one of the elusive space rocks requires a combination of advanced telescope technology and patience. Courtesy of a partnership between the summer REU program at NSF’s National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and a similar summer program at NASA, the students--Nelvin Thomas, a recent graduate of the University of the Virgin Islands, and Vincent Davis, a junior at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina--are scanning the sky for 10 weeks from the home observatory of an amateur astronomer and employee of the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO).

NSO's Roy Tucker (center) oversees Vincent Davis' and Nelvin Thomas' search for asteroids in his backyard observatory.

Thomas and Davis were selected for the NASA Undergraduate Research Program in Astrophysics managed by South Carolina State University (SCSU). SCSU and the students' home institutions are historically black colleges that are working with NASA to increase the number of minority students who attend graduate school in space science-related fields. Through networking among teachers and astronomers, NSO staffer Roy Tucker offered to work with the students on a nighttime asteroid project. In the daytime, Tucker is an instrumentation engineer for the solar observatory’s Global Oscillation Network, which studies surface waves on the sun.

The students are using three 14-inch telescopes outfitted with CCD cameras in Tucker's backyard observatory west of Tucson, Ariz. Instead of tracking the sky like most telescopes, these three are bolted to their mounts and the rotation of the earth does the pointing for them. Multiple images can detect a hint of a moving object against the relatively "stationary" background stars. [Doug Isbell, NOAO, 520/318-8214]