The proposal is dubbed ATLAS short for the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System and calls for two telescopes to serve as an early warning system against incoming asteroids. Scientists hope such a system could provide many hours or days notice of an impending Earth impact.

Leading the ATLAS effort here are space scientists John Tonry and Robert Jedicke of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii.

As sketched out, the proposed ATLAS project would include two observatories separated by about 60 miles that can simultaneously scan the entire night sky visible from their locations twice a night. Each observatory would be composed of four commercially available telescopes, with two at each site observing the same region of the sky. ( 5 reasons to care about asteroids.) [ MSNBC ]