Speaker
Description
BLAST is going to monitor the sky for transients at high time resolution. The core science cases are detecting: 1) short lived bright transients, 2) slower transients, like SNe, 3) Jupiter like transiting planets in Jupiter like orbits, 4) asteroids heading towards Earth. We are building prototypes of very wide field cameras, that in pairs monitor each 1.1% of the sky (450 sqr degrees) with a time resolution of 10 sec and a pixel scale of 10". 2 x 100 cameras will cover the entire sky. The limiting magnitude is r=14 for individual exposures and r=18 after 3 hours. By having pairs of cameras, spurious events can be filtered out. By separating the two cameras by 100 km, sources within 2 MKm from Earth will be rejected through their parallax. We invite partners to participate in BLAST by contributing financially or through manpower.