The WASP Project and the SuperWASP Cameras

The SuperWASP cameras are wide-field imaging systems at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, and at the Sutherland Station of the South African Astronomical Observatory. Each instrument has a field of view of some 482 deg2 with an angular scale of 13.7" pixel-1, and is capable of delivering photometry with accuracy better than 1% for objects having V~7.0-11.5. Lower quality data for objects brighter than V~15.0 are stored in the project archive. The systems, while designed to monitor fields with high cadence, are capable of surveying the entire visible sky every 40 minutes. Depending on the observational strategy, the data rate can be up to 100 Gbytes per night. We have produced a robust, largely automatic reduction pipeline and advanced archive, which are used to serve the data products to the consortium members. The main science aim of these systems is to search for bright transiting exoplanet systems suitable for spectroscopic follow-up observations. The first 6 month season of SuperWASP-North observations produced light curves of ~6.7 million objects with 12.9 billion data points.

Status of SuperWASP I (La Palma)

SuperWASP is an ultra-wide field (over 300 sq. degrees) photometric survey project designed to monitor stars between 7 - 15 mag to high precision and with high cadence over long (greater than or equal to2 months) timescales. The primary science goal of this project is the detection of exoplanetary transits, as well as NEOs and optical transients. The resulting photometric catalogue will be made public via a web-based interface. The SuperWASP instrument consists of an array of cameras each with a 7.8degrees x 7.8degrees field of view, guided by a robotic fork mount and sited in a fibreglass enclosure at the Observatorio de Roque de los Muchachos (ORM), La Palma, Canary Islands. In this progress report, we describe the specifications of the instrument, its semi-automated operation and pipeline data reduction.

Physical and dynamical characterisation of low ΔV NEA (190491) 2000 FJ10

Aims: We investigated the physical properties and dynamical evolution of near-Earth asteroid (NEA) (190491) 2000 FJ10 in order to assess the suitability of this accessible NEA as a space mission target. Methods: Photometry and colour determination were carried out with the 1.54 m Kuiper Telescope (Mt Bigelow, USA) and the 10 m Southern African Large Telescope (SALT; Sutherland, South Africa) during the object's recent favourable apparition in 2011-12. During the earlier 2008 apparition, a spectrum of the object in the 6000-9000 Angstrom region was obtained with the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope (WHT; Canary Islands, Spain). Interpretation of the observational results was aided by numerical simulations of 1000 dynamical clones of 2000 FJ10 up to 106 yr in the past and in the future. Results: The asteroid's spectrum and colours determined by our observations suggest a taxonomic classification within the S-complex although other classifications (V, D, E, M, P) cannot be ruled out. On this evidence, it is unlikely to be a primitive, relatively unaltered remnant from the early history of the solar system and thus a low priority target for robotic sample return. Our photometry placed a lower bound of 2 h to the asteroid's rotation period. Its absolute magnitude was estimated to be 21.54 ± 0.1 which, for a typical S-complex albedo, translates into a diameter of 130 ± 20 m. Our dynamical simulations show that it has likely been an Amor for the past 105 yr. Although currently not Earth-crossing, it will likely become so during the period 50-100 kyr in the future. It may have arrived from the inner or central main belt >1 Myr ago as a former member of a low-inclination S-class asteroid family. Its relatively slow rotation and large size make it a suitable destination for a human mission. We show that ballistic Earth-190491-Earth transfer trajectories with ΔV <2 km s-1 at the asteroid exist between 2052 and 2061. Based on observations made with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT).