The Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands had a surprise during the development of the new TST telescope, recently installed at the Teide Observatory, which located a new asteroid “close to Earth,” explains Miguel R. Alarcon, a predoctoral researcher in the IAC Solar System group and discoverer of the object.
“The object discovered in the TST images had a particular motion, much faster and with a different direction than the other asteroids observed. If this is confirmed, we knew it Its orbit could be compatible with that of a near-Earth asteroid“, explains Miguel R. Alarcon, predoctoral researcher in the IAC Solar System group and discoverer of the object.
They found each other more than 50 asteroid candidates unidentified objects, half of which were later linked by the Minor Planet Center (MPC), a reference center coordinated by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to other already known objects. Among the unknowns, one of them entered directly into the list of high priority for confirmation as a possible near-Earth object (NEO).
This new near-Earth asteroid has a diameter about 50 meters and belongs to the Apollo group. “The Apollos are asteroids whose orbit intersects that of our planet at two points,” says Javier Licandro, a researcher at the IAC. “If it had been bigger, we would be talking about a potentially dangerous asteroid,” he adds.
The asteroid, called 2024 NP2 was located on the night of July 4 during the first regular commissioning observations of the Transient Survey Telescope (TST), an astronomical facility in public-private collaboration with the IAC, managed by the Canarian company Light Bridges at the Teide Observatory (Tenerife). The TST is a wide-field robotic telescope that, with a 1-meter diameter mirror and a camera with an sCMOS sensor at the prime focus, allows images to be obtained covering an area of more than 4 square degrees (the equivalent of the area covered by 22 full moons).
The observation strategy was coordinated in regions with a high probability of finding asteroids, with the dual objective of verifying the instrument’s capabilities in characterizing known objects and searching for possible new asteroids not detected by any other telescope in the world until then.
Other telescopes at the Teide Observatory were used that same night and the following nights to refine the orbit of the NEO candidate and inform the MPC. “These results confirm the capacity of the Transient Survey Telescope as a quality instrument for the study and discovery “The asteroid is a moving object,” explains Miquel Serra-Ricart, co-discoverer of the asteroid and scientific director of TST. On July 9, the MPC published a circular confirming the discovery and provisionally naming the object 2024 NP2.
2024 NP2 is the Discovery of the first near-Earth asteroid by the Solar System Group IAC of the Teide Observatory. The detection capacity of these objects from the observatories of the Canary Islands will increase considerably from this year 2024, not only with the installation of the TST, but also thanks to the entry into service of the twin two-meter telescope (TTT) and the future telescope ATLAS. -Teide, directed by Javier Licandro, which will consolidate the Teide Observatory as a fundamental node of the international ATLAS network, dedicated to early warning of the danger of asteroid impacts.
