Richard Hill, a senior research specialist for Catalina Sky Survey, prepared the 1.5-meter telescope for his night's viewing in October atop Mount Lemmon.

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Undergraduate astronomy students at the University of Arizona will soon have the opportunity to hone their research techniques and maybe even save the world as the Catalina Sky Survey expands its search for asteroids that could wipe out our civilization.

With new technology and continued NASA funding announced this week, the Catalina Sky Survey should cement its position as king of the hill among asteroid watchers.

Operating three telescopes — two in the Catalina Mountains and a third that scans the southern skies from Australia — the Sky Survey can lay claim to spotting 70 percent of the near-Earth objects observed in the past three years.

The program scans the skies nightly for faint dots of light that could be comets or asteroids, distinguished in a sea of fixed stars by their movement in the intervals between image-taking.

NASA has awarded $3.16 million to run the program for an additional three years through April 2012.

NASA also recently contributed $250,000 toward a new dome and refurbished 1-meter telescope being built next to the 1.5-meter scope already used by the survey at Steward Observatory's site atop Mount Lemmon.

The grant, which was matched by two private donors who requested anonymity, also allowed Catalina Sky Watch to boost its computer transmission capabilities from Mount Bigelow and Mount Lemmon to campus, said Ed Beshore, survey co-investigator and senior scientist with Steward and the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

The new telescope will be run robotically and connected via computer link to campus, Beshore said. It will allow student researchers to immediately follow up discoveries made by Sky Watch observers. It is important to plot the orbital trajectory of the objects before they lose themselves again in that sea of stars, Beshore said.

The computer link will also make it possible for student researchers to add additional eyes to the discovery process, he said.

Beshore said Catalina Sky Survey's success in notching discoveries is due to its "triple threat" option. On any given night, three operators photograph the night skies from the three telescopes, including the one in Australia.

A computer program quickly flags the moving objects, separating out previously discovered ones and satellites in Earth orbit.

The final call is made by the observer. "The human eye-brain combo is so much better than the computer," Beshore said. With the additional eyes on campus, he expects the survey will go "much fainter, further into the noise."

Doing follow-up on orbits from campus will also free the operators for more discovery time, he said.

Employing students will "give them an opportunity to get involved in research and also a chance to earn slave wages," Beshore said.

NASA has upped the ante for sky survey programs, which accomplished much of the goal for 2008 set by the national space program of identifying 90 percent of near-Earth objects a kilometer or more in diameter.

Now researchers are searching for near-Earth objects 140 meters or more in size. Beshore estimates that 50,000 to 80,000 such objects exist.