PREFACE

Japan Spaceguard Association

PRESIDENT �@Syuzo ISOBE

The Japan Spaceguard Association was set up in 1997 to work for the Near Earth Asteroids (NEA) problems. We started to build the Bisei Spaceguard Center with a collaboration of the Japan Space Forum (JSF) and a support of the National Space Development Agency (NASDA). Three telescopes with apertures of the primary, 25cm, and 100cm, have been set up. The 1 m telescope have a mosaic CCD camera with 10 times 2k x 4k CCD chips covering a 7 square degree field which produces 160 Mbyte data for every shot. Additionally to detect many NEOs, we decided to use these data for educational purpose, and prepare a large data storage accessible through high speed network line. Beside of these hardware, our team have developed a software to be used for educational fields such as in school classrooms, in science museums, and by individual persons. This software is now opened to the public. We sincerely invite you to use this software, to get some knowledge of asteroids, to enjoy asteroid detection from real observational data, and to have a honor of new asteroid discovery under a fortunate situation. The BATTeRS team worked and will work to prepare all the necessary data for those users. We hope you to enjoy asteroid detection and not to hesitate to send us any question, request, and suggestion for our software.