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Projects: Shoemaker NEO GrantsThe 2007 Gene Shoemaker NEO Grant RecipientsThe 2007 Gene Shoemaker Near Earth Object Grants, totaling $34,500 (US), were awarded to an international collection of amateur astronomers and researchers:
The observers and their projects were selected from a group of 23 proposals that The Planetary Society received from 11 different countries on five continents.
Eric Allen, from Quebec,
Canada, is awarded $3,600 to automate the dome of a 0.4-meter telescope so
it can be used robotically.
Robert Holmes, Jr., of the Astronomical Research Institute
in Illinois, USA, is awarded $8,000 for the purchase of a Santa Barbara Instruments
Group STL1001E CCD camera. Holmes and his NEO Follow-up Project team will
use the new camera on their 0.81-meter telescope to provide observations of
Near Earth Objects to magnitudes fainter than 21. The Planetary Society Shoemaker
Grant will allow the 0.81-meter telescope camera to be controlled robotically,
dramatically expanding the data returned from the telescope.
Jean-Claude Pelle's observing location in Tahiti is not
only enviable, but is also scientifically valuable, being in the southern
hemisphere. Pelle is awarded $5,000 for the purchase of a new CCD camera for
a 0.4-meter telescope.
Donald P.
Pray operates the Carbuncle Hill Observatory in Rhode Island, U.S.A.
He is awarded $7,500 to upgrade and put back into service a 0.35-meter
telescope that was displaced when he installed a 0.5-meter instrument.
He plans to get both telescopes operating simultaneously and robotically.
Pray is one of the most active observers on the "BinAstSurvey" project,
which is searching for asynchronous binary asteroids among small NEAs,
Mars-crossers, and inner main belt asteroids, and has himself discovered
a number of NEO binaries and contributed observations of many others.
Giovanni Sostero represents
the Associazione Friulana di Astronomia e Meteorologia in Remanzacco, Udine,
Italy. Sostero and his collaborators Vincenzo Santini, Antonio Lepardo,
Ernesto Guido, Virgilio Gonano and Luca Donato are awarded $4,400 for the
purchase of a computer to control the CCD camera on their 0.45-meter telescope,
for the purchase of a coma corrector for the telescope to provide a better
field-of-view for the camera, and for the purchase of a set of color filters
for photometric observations of NEOs.
Brian
Warner is awarded $4,000 to fund an additional 0.35- to 0.4-meter
telescope for the Palmer Divide Observatory in Colorado, USA. Warner's observations
of NEOs will be made over a sufficient range of phase angles in order to
establish accurate absolute magnitude and phase slope parameters for targeted
objects. These data can be used to find the sizes of asteroids and to better
understand the nature of their surfaces.
Quanzhi Ye from Guangzhou, China, is an 18-year old college student and the principal investigator of the Lulin Sky Survey. Ye is awarded $2,000 to purchase a laptop and software to run a 16-inch automated telescope at a fairly unique northern hemisphere observing site. The Planetary Society thanks all the Shoemaker NEO Grant applicants. |
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