Thank you for your interest! SPACEWATCH® does not regularly seek nor do we regularly employ volunteer workers. An important way of helping our work, however, and of advancing the NEO field generally, would be for citizens such as yourself to express to your Senators and Representatives your appreciation of the importance of NEO work. SPACEWATCH® is a major planetary resource in the effort to discover and monitor NEOs which could pose a hazard to the Earth by colliding, or which can become mineral resources in future by being mined while orbiting the sun.

All positions for staff, faculty, and graduate assistantships in the SPACEWATCH® Project would be advertised on this web page by means of a link to the official advertisement on the University of Arizona Human Resources web site. If no "Job Available" link is present on the main SPACEWATCH® page, that means there are no openings at the present time. If there is a "Job Available" link, please follow the procedure for application that is described in the ad.

We are glad to hear of your interest in our work. Please try to learn as much as you can from our publications, our web site, and the other sites to which our site links before requesting personal help. When you finally do have questions that aren't answered by our papers, it helps us if you tell us how much you already know about the subject and what you have already done to find the answers you seek. That is the most educational way to do research for school, and it helps us to write answers at your educational level.

All SPACEWATCH® material, unless otherwise credited, is copyrighted by the Arizona Board of Regents, with which all rights are reserved. No part of SPACEWATCH® material may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission in advance from:

The images on this website have been optimized for viewing over the internet, in terms of image size and file size. Most color photographs are stored in JPEG format, allowing for true color and fast downloads. Many of the CCD images of asteroids and comets are stored in GIF format, to better represent the quality of the original. Our images of asteroids appear 'grainy' because the image displayed is only a small, magnified cropping from the original CCD image. They were magnified to make the asteroid's movement easier to see, but no pixel information was lost.

The only organization with internationally-recognized authority to name asteroids is the Committee on Small Bodies Nomenclature (CSBN) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). We Spacewatchers, as members of the IAU, subscribe to and recognize that authority. In the case of asteroids with orbits good enough to receive permanent numbers from the IAU's Minor Planet Center (MPC), names may be suggested by the discoverers. Suggested names are reviewed by the CSBN and the approved names are announced periodically by the IAU. A description of how objects are named can be found in:

SPACEWATCH® pioneered the use of "Drift-Scanning" with CCD's as a way to maximize the amount of data they could collect with their telescope. Stars and asteroids, just like the Sun and Moon, are affected by the Earth's rotation. They rise in the East, move overhead, and set in the West over the course of a day. Most telescopes will move to whatever target they wish to observe, use the telescope's motors to follow the target, take a picture with a CCD and then read the picture out so it can be examined.

This is probably the most commonly asked question! While SPACEWATCH® discovers and tracks asteroids, we do not calculate impact probabilities. That is the job of other institutions (Minor Planet Center, JPL NEO Office, and NEODyS). Currently, there are no known asteroids or comets that are on a collision course with the Earth in the predictable future. There are several potentially hazardous asteroids that have orbits which could make them dangerous sometime in the future.

The latest news about close passes of asteroids and comets by the earth can often be found at the astronomy magazine online sites, and the NASA Solar System Exploration site, which are updated very frequently. These are often the best, most reliable, and easiest to access sources of information on fast-breaking, important, news stories in Astronomy. We can recommend:

For many reasons, SPACEWATCH® no longer hosts camera crews at the telescope.

You may preview selected videos online at our SPACEWATCH® Videos website.

Thank you for your understanding!