Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search
Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search (LONEOS) is a program run by NASA and Lowell Observatory to discover near-Earth objects. The LONEOS system began observations in December 1997. The principal investigator is Ted Bowell.
LONEOS uses a Schmidt camera system with a 0.6m aperture primary mirror that gives a wide field of view of about 3° of the sky. It has a nightly scan rate of about 1,000 square degrees. (The camera can cover the entire visible sky in about a month.) The CCD has detected asteroids as faint as visual magnitude 19.8.
The task of managing the camera and searching for asteroids is primarily performed using computers and some custom-written software. In addition to discovering thousands of asteroids, LONEOS has also discovered the periodic comets 150P/LONEOS and 159P/LONEOS.