Possible asteroid found by astronomy class at MPA
For the next month, students in the Upper School Astronomy course will be working as part of an international collaboration of secondary schools and universities to detect and identify asteroids in our solar system. As one of 40 schools throughout the world participating in the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC), Maui Preparatory Academy has been paired with a school in England to search sets of images taken by the Pan-STARRS telescope located right here on Maui. Students use sequences of images to identify moving objects which may or may not be known asteroids. The animation at left shows one such object found in our first set of images – a moving object which has been provisionally determined to be a new asteroid! If this is indeed a newly discovered asteroid, it will bear the name MPA0001, though it can take 3-6 years of observations and study for researchers to determine the orbital characteristics of the new asteroid.
