OLS

 J75 La Sagra Sky Survey

The current instrumentation used by LSSS to scan the sky consists of three 0.45-m f/2.8 telescopes. Follow-up of potentially interesting objects is done with a dedicated tracking telescope. The entire data acquisition and data reduction is done remotely via the Internet, by LSSS team members in Spain, Croatia and Hong Kong. For security and safety reasons one operator is permanently present at OLS. He is also supporting the remote observers and doing regular maintenance work. Since the August 2008 dark run LSSS is officially classified as a survey by the MPC.

To this date (June 2010) LSSS has been credited with 4.464 asteroid discoveries, of which 22 are NEOs. Some of these objects are classified as unusual (Near-Earth Objects, Centaurs, Jupiter Trojans, Mars Trojans, Hungarias etc.). The most productive month in terms of discoveries has been August 2008 with 584 discoveries. Furthermore three comets were discovered until now.

LSSS discovery statistics

The plot on the left shows the evolution of LSSS asteroid discoveries since August 2006. The first two years were devoted mainly to test different equipment and to evaluate its usefulness for asteroid hunting. The number of discoveries virtually exploded in the summer of 2008 when the current instrumentation became operational. The plot on the right shows the distribution of semimajor axis versus inclination values for all LSSS discoveries with known orbits.

Near-Earth Objects discovered by LSSS

2006 WH1, 2008 OO, 2008 PG7, 2008 PV16, 2009 DA1, 2009 FD, 2009 HV77, 2009 KY1, 2009 KD5, 2009 NA, 2009 NJ, 2009 OC,
2009 QY33, 2009 RN, 2009 TA1, 2009 TK8, 2009 UK28, 2009 XD, 2009 XO, 2010 BB3, 2010 BC3, 2010 CC180, 2010 ES12, 2010 EF44,
2010 EV45 ^new.

Comets discovered by LSSS

P/2009 QG31 (La Sagra), P/2009 T2 (La Sagra), P/2009 WJ50 (La Sagra) ^new.

Some interesting things done at LSSS

Tracking Earth Impactor 2008 TC3 before impact over Sudan

Discovery of unidentified space debris from the Herschel Planck launch aboard Ariane 5 ECA

Acknowledgement

The LSSS team deeply appreciates the crucial confirmation and follow-up work done by the restless NEOCP community.

People behind LSSS

Present team members: Salvador Sanchez, Jaime Nomen, Reiner Stoss, Bill Yeung, Juan Rodriguez

Operator in situ: Miguel Hurtado

Former team members: Aleksandar Cikota, Stefan Cikota

One of the LSSS telescopes by night, scanning the sky for Near-Earth Objects.

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