About Us

The ATLAS team is composed of astronomers and engineers from the University of Hawaii and the Space Telescope Science Institute as well as dedicated volunteers who provide important support. We are dedicated to making the world safer from asteroid impacts. All of us are enthusiastic about coupling state-of-the-art camera technology to sophisticated computerized image processing in order to take advantage of what modern computers can do for astronomy.

John Tonry	University of Hawaii
	John Tonry received his PhD from Harvard in 1980, was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and Caltech, and then became a faculty member in the physics department at MIT. After 11 years the lure of Hawaii became too great to resist and he joined the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy in 1996. John has been heavily involved in using high redshift supernovae (SNIa) to measure cosmological parameters as well as other research projects such as studying black holes in galaxy centers and determining distances to nearby galaxies. He and the rest of the High-Z team discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe from dark energy in 1998 and have continued ever since identifying and following SNIa to refine those measurements. He and his students have developed new methods to characterize SNIa from their spectra and measure distances from their light curves, and eagerly using the new information from Pan-STARRS1. John is one of the principals who initiated and led the Pan-STARRS project to the construction of the first prototype telescope, Pan-STARRS1 on Haleakala. He led and managed the $7M effort to build the Pan-STARRS GPC1 Camera - the world's first gigapixel camera. (The LSST camera, at twice the pixel count, is budgeted to cost more than 10 times as much.) GPC1 was ready for use in Aug 2007 and has operated since then without significant problem. He continues as a consultant for the engineers who are presently building GPC2.
Robert Jedicke	University of Hawaii
	Robert Jedicke has had four professional careers: football, particle physics, astronomy, and software engineering. He received his PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Toronto, Canada. After a brief stint in the professional Canadian Football league with the B.C. Lions in Vancouver he held post-doctoral positions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ilinois, and at the University of Arizona's Lunar & Planetary Laboratory where he worked on the Spacewatch near Earth asteroid survey. He spent more than five years at Veeco Corporation in Tucson, Arizona, developing image analysis software for interferometers before accepting a faculty position at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy in 2003. Rob managed the development of the Pan-STARRS moving object processing system that is now reporting precision asteroid detections to the Minor Planet Center. Rob is now a co-lead on the Inner Solar System team for the Pan-STARRS 1 Science Consortium. Most of his research in the past decade has been focussed on identifying asteroids and comets that might hit the Earth some day and on characterizing their orbit and size distribution. He joined Pan-STARRS to design the system to identify large asteroids years, decades, and even centuries before impact. His work on ATLAS will help identify the smaller asteroids that hit the Earth much more frequently.
Armin Rest	Space Telescope Science Institute
	Armin Rest came to the US as a Baden-Wuerttemberg - Oregon exchange student at the Physics Department of Portland State University where he received his M.S. in physics. He decided to stay in the United States and received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Washington. As a NOAO Goldberg fellow he then spent 4 years at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in La Serena, Chile where he was one of the leaders of the SuperMACHO and ESSENCE projects, two time-domain sky surveys that investigate dark matter and dark energy, respectively. Armin's research interests have mainly been focussed on observational cosmology with a particular emphasis on detection and analysis of rare transient events. i.e. things in our universe that happen infrequently and last for only short periods of time. Returning from Chile, he worked for three years at Harvard University where his focus shifted toward PanSTARRS, the next big wide-field, time-domain survey, as well as following up galaxy cluster candidates detected by the South Pole Telescope via the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. He also leads a group investigating light echoes of ancient and historic supernovae. In 2010 Armin accepted a position as an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD.
Richard Wainscoat	University of Hawaii
	Richard Wainscoat received his PhD from the Australian National University in 1986.
Elsie Lee
	Elsie Lee is the webmaster of www.fallingstar.com.