Re: Interesting article

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

BP told me about the paper and I downloaded it.  They sure are trying to do 
everything.  Note they plan a dual system with a long base line among other 
things.  You all may recall that I suggested doing this with tass 
cameras.  They have one system at Los Alamos and the other at Fenton 
Hill.  Fenton Hill is where the Mark II ended up.  So I was the first 
system to take data at that location.

Unlike some other efforts in the literature, this does not seem to be a 
paper tiger.  There are pictures of the equipment but no data.  They seem 
to have found money to do everything that they could think up.  Not too 
hard at Los Alamos, at least at this scale.  Hmmmm!  Possibly they told 
their funding agency that Saddam Hussain could test bombs in space and they 
want to be ready to track them.

They seem to be trying to do everything.  Long base line object tracking, 
photometry, fast response to transients, very wide field imaging, fast 
computing to locate transient objects, you name it and it is in their 
paper.  They even include a spectrometer.  I wonder if they will do 
everything well.

I think I will just stick to grinding away measuring stars.  I just hope 
that I can learn to do it.

Tom Droege





t 07:17 PM 9/22/02 -0400, you wrote:
>All,
>
>Came across this article while browsing through some astrophysics articles.
>
>Don't know if its new news, but it is an interesting side note on TASS.  Its
>about a project at Los Alamos called Raptor.
>
>Rich Knowles
>Oxford OH
>
>http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0209/0209300.pdf