Spacewatch

The 1.8 meter Spacewatch telescope and its building on Kitt Peak were dedicated on June 7, 1997 for the purpose of finding previously unknown asteroids and comets. Since January 1 2003, Spacewatch has made ~2400 separate-night detections of Near-Earth Objects. There was an upgrade to the 0.9 meter which was funded by NASA and the Kirsch Foundation. The Spacewatch Project is the longest-running of all present programs of astrometry of solar system objects, and was the first to use CCDs to survey the sky for comets and asteroids. == Spacewatch in action ==

Spacewatch conducted a survey that was proposed May 12, 2006, and accepted on November 13, 2006. This survey used data taken over 34 months by the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch Project based at Steward Observatory, Kitt Peak. Spacewatch revisited the same sky area every three to seven nights in order to track cohorts of main-belt asteroids. This survey discovered one new large Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) and detected six others. This proved that new sweeps of the sky are productive even if they have been previously examined simply due to the complexities of running large surveys over many nights and variable conditions. == Notable discoveries ==

detected by various projects: • Callirrhoe • 5145 Pholus • 9965 GNU • 9885 Linux • 9882 Stallman • 9793 Torvalds • 20000 Varuna • 60558 Echeclus • , target of JAXA's Hayabusa2 extended mission. • 65803 Didymos, target of the DART mission • • • (136617) 1994 CC • C/1992 J1 • C/2011 KP36| • 125P/Spacewatch • 174567 Varda • • The project rediscovered 719 Albert, a long-lost asteroid. == See also ==