Design and operation of the ATLAS Transient Science Server

Understand

The Asteroid Terrestrial impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) system consists of two 0.5m Schmidt telescopes with cameras covering 29 square degrees at plate scale of 1.86 arcsec per pixel.

• Working in tandem, the telescopes routinely survey the whole sky visible from Hawaii (above $\delta > -50^{\circ}$) every two nights, exposing four times per night, typically reaching $o < 19$ magnitude per exposure when the moon is illuminated and $c < 19.5$ per exposure in dark skies.
• Construction is underway of two further units to be sited in Chile and South Africa which will result in an all-sky daily cadence from 2021.
• Initially designed for detecting potentially hazardous near earth objects, the ATLAS data enable a range of astrophysical time domain science.