The RAPTOR Project

RAPTOR - RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response

In 2002, the RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response (RAPTOR) project pushed the envelope of automated astronomy by becoming the first fully autonomous closed–loop robotic telescope. RAPTOR was designed in 2000 and began full deployment in 2002. Its first light on one of the wide field instruments was in late 2001, with the second wide field system coming online in early 2002. Closed loop operations began in 2002.

Originally the goal of RAPTOR was to develop a system of ground-based telescopes that would reliably respond to satellite triggers and more importantly, identify transients in real-time and generate alerts with source locations to enable follow-up observations with other, larger, telescopes. It has achieved both of these goals quite successfully. Now RAPTOR is being re-tuned to be the key hardware element of the Thinking Telescope Project  (http://www.thinkingtelescopes.lanl.gov/). Its new mandate will be the monitoring of the night sky looking for interesting and anomalous behaviors in persistent sources

The two wide field systems are comprised of a mosaic of 85mm camera lenses, mounted on Apogee AP-10 2kx2k CCD cameras. The mosaic covers and area of approximately 1500 square degrees to a depth of 12th magnitude. Centered in each wide filed array is a single fovea system using a 400mm lenses mounted on the same camera system with a field of view of 4 degrees and depth of 16th magnitude. The wide filed systems are separated by a 38km baseline. Supporting these wide field systems are two other operational telescopes. The first of these is a cataloging patrol instrument using a mosaic of the 400mm lenses on the same cameras giving a mosaic 16 square degree field of view to 16 magnitude. The other system is a .4m OTA with a back illuminated 1kx1k Apogee Camera yielding a depth of 19-20th magnitude and a coverage of .35 degrees. Three additional systems are currently undergoing development and testing and deployment will be staged over the next two years.

All of the systems are mounted on Shier custom, fast-slewing mounts capable of reaching any point in the sky in 3 seconds. Typical response to imaging times run approximately 3-6 seconds for all the telescopes.

The RAPTOR System is located on site at Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA) and has been supported through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development funds

For More Information see the RAPTOR (http://www.raptor.lanl.gov/) website.