http://www.hindawi.comThe latest articles from Hindawi Publishing Corporation© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/873059.htmlWe present results from ongoing science projects conducted by members of the Faulkes Telescope (FT) team and Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT). Many of these projects incorporate observations carried out and analysed by FT users, comprising amateur astronomers and schools. We also discuss plans for the further development of the LCOGT network.Fraser Lewis, Rachel Street, Paul Roche, Vanessa Stroud, and David M. Russell© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/963650.htmlThe overall reflectance of sunlight from Earth is a fundamental parameter for climate studies. We have designed and implemented small aperture, remote control telescopes in Big Bear Solar Observatory in California and in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. These telescopes observe the earthshine to obtain a global mean terrestrial reflectance utilizing a coronagraph-like design for long exposures of the dark of the Moon and have internal moving parts in the optical train, which presented some design and control problems.P. R. Goode, S. Shoumko, E. Pallé, and P. Montañés-Rodríguez© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/278207.htmlThe key objectives of RTRCAB are the identification of new exoplanets and especially the characterization of the known exoplanets by observing photometric and systematic monitoring of their transits. These telescopes, equipped with advanced technology, optimized control programs, and optical and technical characteristics adequate for this purpose, are ideal to make the observations that are required to carry out these programs. The achievement of these goals is ensured by the existence of three separated geographical stations. In this sense, there are several planned missions that have the same objectives among their scientific goals, like Kepler, CoRoT, GAIA, and PLATO.Luis Cuesta, M. Teresa Eibe, Aurora Ullán, Antonio Pérez-Verde, and Jorge Navas© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/214604.htmlWe are developing and operating the automatic telescope Aoyama Gakuin University Robotic Optical Monitor for Astrophysical objects (AROMA) in the Sagamihara Campus of Aoyama Gakuin University. AROMA is composed of two observational equipments, AROMA-N and AROMA-W. AROMA-N is a 30-cm aperture telescope system for rapid follow-up observations of the optical afterglow of gamma-ray bursts. Automatic analysis pipeline for AROMA-N has been developed and is working. The other observational equipment AROMA-W is a wide-field observation system using multiple digital single-lens reflex cameras. It covers a large FOV of about 35°×25°. AROMAW provides photometric data in four bands with a limiting V magnitude of about 12-13 mag. Software to analyze massive image data automatically is being developed. We plan to monitor the luminosities of all the stars in the FOV of AROMA-W, detect optical transients, and trigger a follow-up observation with AROMA-N. We report on the development status and observational results of AROMA.Ichiro Takahashi, Kosuke Tsunashima, Takayuki Shiraki, Toru Kojima, Atsumasa Yoshida, and Yujin E. Nakagawa© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/278434.htmlWe review numerical works carried out over the last decade on the role of environmental mechanisms in shaping nature of the faintest galaxies known, dwarf spheroidals (dSphs). The combination of tidally induced morphological transformation, termed tidal stirring, with mass loss due to tidal and ram-pressure stripping aided by heating due to the cosmic ionizing background can turn late-type dwarfs resembling present-day dIrrs into classic dSphs. The time of infall into the primary halo is shown to be a key parameter. Dwarfs accreting at z>1, when the cosmic ultraviolet ionizing flux was much higher than today, and was thus able to keep the gas in the dwarfs warm and diffuse, were rapidly stripped of their baryons via ram pressure and tidal forces, producing very dark-matter-dominated objects with truncated star-formation histories, such as the Draco dSph. The low star-formation efficiency expected in such low-metallicity objects prior to their infall was crucial for keeping their disks gas dominated until stripping took over. Therefore gas stripping along with inefficient star-formation provides a new feedback mechanism, alternative to photoevaporation or supernovae feedback, playing a crucial role in dwarf galaxy formation and evolution. We also discuss how the ultra-faint dSphs belong to a different population of lower-mass dwarf satellites that were mostly shaped by reionization rather than by environmental mechanisms (“reionization fossils”). Finally, we scrutinize the various caveats in the current understanding of environmental effects as well as other recent ideas on the origin of Local Group dSphs.Lucio Mayer© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/194946.html“Pi of the Sky” experiment has been designed for continuous observations of a large part of the sky, in search for astrophysical phenomena characterized by short timescales, especially for prompt optical counterparts of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). Other scientific goals include searching for novae and supernovae stars and monitoring of blasars and AGNs activity. “Pi of the Sky” is a fully autonomous, robotic detector, which can operate for long periods of time without a human supervision. A crucial element of the detector is an advanced software for real-time data analysis and identification of short optical transients. The most important result so far has been an independent detection and observation of the prompt optical emission of the “naked-eye” GRB080319B.Katarzyna Małek, Tadeusz Batsch, Henryk Czyrkowski, Mikołaj Ćwiok, Ryszard Dąbrowski, Wojciech Dominik, Grzegorz Kasprowicz, Ariel Majcher, Agnieszka Majczyna, Lech Mankiewicz, Krzysztof Nawrocki, Robert Pietrzak, Lech W. Piotrowski, Maria Ptasińska, Małgorzata Siudek, Marcin Sokołowski, Janusz Użycki, Piotr Wawer, Roman Wawrzaszek, Grzegorz Wrochna, Marcin Zaremba, and Aleksander F. Żarnecki© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/785959.htmlThe Telescopi ROBotic de ARas (TROBAR) is a new robotic facility built at Aras de Los Olmos (Valencia, Spain). This is a 60 cm telescope equipped with a 4 k×4 k optical camera, corresponding to 30×30 arcmin2 FoV, and it will be primarily used for a systematic search of Ha emitting stars in the Galactic Plane to a depth of ≈14 mag. Both data acquisition and reduction will be performed automatically. The robotization of data acquisition is now entering its final coding phase while the development of the data reduction pipeline has just started.Mauro Stefanon© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/943145.htmlThe double station observation of the meteors by means of sensitive image intensifier technique started at the Ondrejov Observatory 10 years ago. The sensitivity of such instrumentation allows detection of the meteors down to masses of fractions of gram. Moreover, video technique provides us with a time resolution of the meteor events. On the other side, the precision of the video data is lower in comparison with the photographic data. We are introducing technological progress on the project—replacing of the S-VHS camcorders with gigabite, ethernet cameras and making the whole process of video observation automatic.Stanislav Vítek, Pavel Koten, Petr Páta, and Karel Fliegel© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/970306.htmlThe Astrophysical Institute Potsdam (AIP) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) inaugurated the robotic telescopes STELLA-I and STELLA-II (STELLar Activity) on Tenerife on May 18, 2006. The observatory is located on the Izaña ridge at an elevation of 2400 m near the German Vacuum Tower Telescope. STELLA consists of two 1.2 m alt-az telescopes. One telescope fiber feeds a bench-mounted high-resolution echelle spectrograph while the other telescope feeds a wide-field imaging photometer. Both scopes work autonomously by means of artificial intelligence. Not only that the telescopes are automated, but the entire observatory operates like a robot, and does not require any human presence on site.Klaus G. Strassmeier, Thomas Granzer, Michael Weber, Manfred Woche, Emil Popow, Arto Järvinen, Janos Bartus, Svend-Marian Bauer, Frank Dionies, Thomas Fechner, Wilbert Bittner, and Jens Paschke© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/194345.htmlWe use N-body simulations to study the effects of tides on the kinematical structure of satellite galaxies orbiting a Milky Way-like potential. Here we focus on the evolution of a spherical, dark matter dominated satellite, which is modelled with two stellar components set ab initio to be spatially and kinematically segregated, in a way that resembles the configuration of the metal poor and metal rich stellar populations in several dwarf spheroidals of the Local Group. We find that an important attenuation of the initial differences in the distribution of the two stellar components occurs for orbits with small pericentric radii. This is mainly due to (i) the loss of the gravitational support provided by the dark matter component after tidal stripping takes place and (ii) tides preferentially affect the more extended stellar component, leading to a net decrease in its velocity dispersion as a response for the mass loss, which thus shrinks the kinematical gap. We apply these ideas to the Sculptor and Carina dwarf spheroidals. Differences in their orbits might help to explain why in the former a clear kinematical separation between metal poor and metal rich stars is apparent, while in Carina this segregation is significantly more subtle.Laura V. Sales, Amina Helmi, and Giuseppina Battaglia© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/183016.htmlThe Montsec Astronomical Observatory (OAdM) is a small-class observatory working in fully unattended control, due to the isolation of the site. Robotic operation is, then, mandatory for its routine use. We present a description of the general control software and several software packages developed. The general control software protects the system specially at the identified single points of failure and makes a distributed control of any subsystem.Josep Colomé, Ignasi Ribas, Xavier Francisco, Kevin Casteels, David Fernández, Jordi Isern, Xavier Palau, and Jordi Torra© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/618975.htmlThe ESA INTEGRAL satellite (International Gamma Ray Laboratory) launched in October 2002 continues to deliver valuable data about the gamma-ray sky. Nearly 450 gamma-ray sources have been detected so far mainly by the IBIS onboard instrument, and others are expected in the future. The first 3.5 years of INTEGRAL public and Core Program data have revealed more than 400 sources and this number is expected to increase to more than 500 in the future (Bird et al. 2007). Alternative method to identify and to analyze INTEGRAL gamma-ray sources using optical light and astronomical archival plates is described, together with additional results from analyses of high-energy sources in these databases.René Hudec and Miloš Klíma© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/125340.htmlA global network of small automated telescopes, the Taiwan Automated Telescope (TAT) network, dedicated to photometric measurements of stellar pulsations, is under construction. Two telescopes have been installed in Teide Observatory, Tenerife, Spain and Maidanak Observatory, Uzbekistan. The third telescope will be installed at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, USA. Each system uses a 9-cm Maksutov-type telescope. The effective focal length is 225 cm, corresponding to an f-ratio of 25. The field of view is 0.62 degree square. The images are taken with a 16-bit 1024×1024 CCD camera. The telescope is equipped with UBVRI filters. Each telescope is fully automated. The telescope can be operated either interactively or fully automatically. In the interactive mode, it can be controlled through the Internet. In the fully automatic mode, the telescope operates with preset parameters without any human care, including taking dark frames and flat frames. The network can also be used for studies that require continuous observations for selected objects.Dean-Yi Chou, Ming-Tsung Sun, Javier Fernandez Fernandez, Li-Han Wang, Antonio Jimenez, Alexander Serebryanskiy, and Shuhrat Ehgamberdiev© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/107569.htmlWe present a method for scheduling observations in small field-of-view transient targeted surveys. The method is based on maximizing the probability of detection of transient events of a given type and age since occurrence; it requires knowledge of the time since the last observation for every observed field, the expected light curve of the event, and the expected rate of events in the fields where the search is performed. In order to test this scheduling strategy we use a modified version of the genetic scheduler developed for the telescope control system RTS2. In particular, we present example schedules designed for a future 50 cm telescope that will expand the capabilities of the CHASE survey, which aims to detect young supernova events in nearby galaxies. We also include a brief description of the telescope and the status of the project, which is expected to enter a commissioning phase in 2010.Francisco Förster, Nicolás López, José Maza, Petr Kubánek, and G. Pignata© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/268501.htmlWe present the photometric analysis of the extended sky fields observed by the TORTORA optical monitoring system. The technology involved in the TORTORA camera is based on the use of a fast TV-CCD matrix with an image intensifier. This approach can both significantly reduce the readout noise and shorten the focal length following to monitor relatively large sky regions with high temporal resolution and adequate detection limit. The performance of the system has been tested using the relative magnitudes of standard stars by means of long image sequences collected at different airmasses and at various intensities of the moon illumination. As expected from the previous laboratory measurements, artifact sources are negligible and do not affect the photometric results. The following analysis is based on a large sample of images acquired by the TORTORA instrument since July 2006.G. Greco, G. Beskin, S. Karpov, S. Bondar, C. Bartolini, A. Guarnieri, and A. Piccioni© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/651621.htmlWe examine the past and current work on the star formation (SF) histories of dwarf galaxies in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. The results obtained from different numerical methods are still somewhat mixed, but the differences are understandable if we consider the numerical and resolution effects. It remains a challenge to simulate the episodic nature of SF history in dwarf galaxies at late times within the cosmological context of a cold dark matter model. More work is needed to solve the mysteries of SF history of dwarf galaxies employing large-scale hydrodynamic simulations on the next generation of supercomputers.Kentaro Nagamine© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/407394.htmlIn the past several years kinematic data sets from Milky Way satellite galaxies have greatly improved, furthering the evidence that these systems are the most dark matter dominated objects known. This paper discusses a maximum likelihood formalism that extracts important quantities from these kinematic data sets, including the amplitude of a rotational signal, proper motions, and the mass distributions. Using a simple model for galaxy rotation it is shown that the expected error on the amplitude of a rotational signal is ∼0.5 km s−1 with ∼103 stars from either classical or ultra-faint satellites. As an example Sculptor is analyzed for the presence of a rotational signal; no significant detection of rotation is found, with a 90% c.l. upper limit of ∼2 km s−1. A criterion for model selection is presented that determines the parameters required to describe the dark matter halo density profiles and the stellar velocity anisotropy. Applied to four data sets with a wide range of velocities, models with variable velocity anisotropy are preferred relative to those with constant velocity anisotropy, and that central dark matter profiles both less cuspy and more cuspy than Lambda-Cold Dark Matter-based fits are equally acceptable.Louis E. Strigari© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/102831.htmlWe present a standalone software tool which makes reports for analysis and evaluation of GRBs. Recently, analysis and evaluation of GRBs were done without help of semiautomated tools or routines; so the time elapsed from the detection until getting all the information produced (DSS-2 data: Digitized Sky Surveys, elevation diagrams in each observatory, etc.) could be 30 minutes. The software presented allows to reduce the time elapsed to 30 seconds, getting an email, web, and sms reports.Sebastián Castillo-Carrión and Alberto Javier Castro-Tirado© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/281913.htmlA decade ago cosmological simulations of increasingly higher resolution were used to demonstrate that virialized regions of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) halos are filled with a multitude of dense, gravitationally bound clumps. These dark matter subhalos are central regions of halos that survived strong gravitational tidal forces and dynamical friction during the hierarchical sequence of merging and accretion via which the CDM halos form. Comparisons with observations revealed that there is a glaring discrepancy between abundance of subhalos and luminous satellites of the Milky Way and Andromeda as a function of their circular velocity or bound mass within a fixed aperture. This large discrepancy, which became known as the “substructure” or the “missing satellites” problem, begs for an explanation. In this paper, the author reviews the progress made during the last several years both in quantifying the problem and in exploring possible scenarios in which it could be accommodated and explained in the context of galaxy formation in the framework of the CDM paradigm of structure formation. In particular, he shows that the observed luminosity function, radial distribution, and the remarkable similarity of the inner density profiles of luminous satellites can be understood within hierarchical CDM framework using a simple model in which efficiency of star formation monotonically decreases with decreasing virial mass satellites had before their accretion without any actual sharp galaxy formation threshold.Andrey Kravtsov© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/101502.htmlThe fully automatic reduction pipeline for the blue channel of the HEROS spectrograph of the Hamburg Robotic Telescope (HRT) is presented. This pipeline is started automatically after finishing the night-time observations and calibrations. The pipeline includes all necessary procedures for a reliable and complete data reduction, that is, Bias, Dark, and Flat Field correction. Also the order definition, wavelength calibration, and data extraction are included. The final output is written in a fits-format and ready to use for the astronomer. The reduction pipeline is implemented in IDL and based on the IDL reduction package REDUCE written by Piskunov and Valenti (2002).Marco Mittag, Alexander Hempelmann, José Nicolás González-Pérez, and Jürgen H. M. M. Schmitt© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2009/632064.htmlThe cosmological constant problem is principally concerned with trying to understand how the zero-point energy of quantum fields contributes to gravity. Here we take the approach that by addressing a fundamental unresolved issue in quantum theory, we can gain a better understanding of the problem. Our starting point is the observation that the notion of classical time is external to quantum mechanics. Hence there must exist an equivalent reformulation of quantum mechanics which does not refer to an external classical time. Such a reformulation is a limiting case of a more general quantum theory which becomes nonlinear on the Planck mass/energy scale. The nonlinearity gives rise to a quantum-classical duality which maps a “strongly quantum, weakly gravitational” dynamics to a “weakly quantum, strongly gravitational” dynamics. This duality predicts the existence of a tiny nonzero cosmological constant of the order of the square of the Hubble constant, which could be a possible source for the observed cosmic acceleration. Such a nonlinearity could also be responsible for the collapse of the wave function during a quantum measurement.T. P. Singh© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/167494.htmlA robotic observatory has been setup in the south-west of Spain with the aim to study meteoroids interacting with the Earth's atmosphere and meteoroids impacting on the Moon's surface. This is achieved by using an array of high-sensitivity CCD video cameras and three automated Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes. We summarize here the main characteristics of this new facility.José M. Madiedo, Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez, José L. Ortiz, and Nicolás Morales© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/478910.htmlIn the cold dark matter scenario, dark matter halos are assembled hierarchically from smaller subunits. Some of these subunits are disrupted during the merging process, whereas others survive temporarily in the form of subhalos. A long-standing problem with this picture is that the number of subhalos predicted by simulations exceeds the number of luminous dwarf galaxies seen in the vicinity of large galaxies like the Milky Way. Many of the subhalos must therefore have remained dark or very faint. If cold dark matter subhalos are as common as predicted, gravitational lensing may in principle offer a promising route to detection. In this paper, we describe the many ways through which lensing by subhalos can manifest itself, and summarize the results from current efforts to constrain the properties of cold dark matter subhalos using such effects.Erik Zackrisson and Teresa Riehm© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/789293.htmlThis paper gives an overview of the attempts to determine the distribution of dark matter in low surface brightness disk and gas-rich dwarf galaxies, both through observations and computer simulations. Observations seem to indicate an approximately constant dark matter density in the inner parts of galaxies, while cosmological computer simulations indicate a steep power-law-like behaviour. This difference has become known as the “core/cusp problem,” and it remains one of the unsolved problems in small-scale cosmology.W. J. G. de Blok© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2009/752439.htmlThe only viable alternative to dark matter is one in which Newtonian dynamics or gravity breaks down in the limit of low accelerations, as in modified Newtonian dynamics (MONDs). This hypothesis, suggested by Milgrom, has been successful in explaining systematic properties of spiral and elliptical galaxies and predicting in detail the observed rotation curves of spiral galaxies with only one additional parameter—a critical acceleration which is on the order of the cosmologically interesting value of cHo. MOND may be viewed as an algorithm for calculating the distribution of force in an astronomical object from the observed distribution of baryonic matter. The fact that it works very well on the scale of galaxies is problematic for cold dark matter (CDM). Here I present evidence in favor of this assertion and claim that this is, in effect, a falsification of CDM on the scale of galaxies.R. H. Sanders© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/158568.htmlIn this tutorial paper we summarize how the star formation (SF) history of a galactic region can be derived from the colour-magnitude diagram (CMD) of its resolved stars. The procedures to build synthetic CMDs and to exploit them to derive the SF histories (SFHs) are described, as well as the corresponding uncertainties. The SFHs of resolved dwarf galaxies of all morphological types, obtained from the application of the synthetic CMD method, are reviewed and discussed. To summarize: (1) only early-type galaxies show evidence of long interruptions in the SF activity; late-type dwarfs present rather continuous, or gasping, SF regimes; (2) a few early-type dwarfs have experienced only one episode of SF activity concentrated at the earliest epochs, whilst many others show extended or recurrent SF activity; (3) no galaxy experiencing now its first SF episode has been found yet; (4) no frequent evidence of strong SF bursts is found; (5) there is no significant difference in the SFH of dwarf irregulars and blue compact dwarfs, except for the current SF rates. Implications of these results on the galaxy formation scenarios are briefly discussed.Michele Cignoni and Monica Tosi© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/357342.htmlMOND is a phenomenological modification of Newton's law of gravitation which reproduces the dynamics of galaxies, without the need for additional dark matter. This paper reviews the basics of MOND and its application to dwarf galaxies. MOND is generally successful at reproducing stellar velocity dispersions in the Milky Way's classical dwarf ellipticals, for reasonable values of the stellar mass-to-light ratio of the galaxies; two discrepantly high mass-to-light ratios may be explained by tidal effects. Recent observations also show MOND describes tidal dwarf galaxies, which form in complex dynamical environments. The application of MOND to galaxy clusters, where it fails to reproduce observed gas temperatures, is also reviewed. Relativistic theories containing MOND in the non-relativistic limit have now been formulated; they all contain new dynamical fields, which may serve as additional sources of gravitation that could reconcile cluster observations with MOND. Certain limits of these theories can also give the accelerating expansion of the Universe. The standard dark matter cosmology boasts numerous manifest triumphs; however, alternatives should also be pursued as long as outstanding observational issues remain unresolved, including the empirical successes of MOND on galaxy scales and the phenomenology of dark energy.Arthur Kosowsky© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/162083.htmlDark Matter annihilation holds great potential for directly probing the clumpiness of the Galactic halo that is one of the key predictions of the Cold Dark Matter paradigm of hierarchical structure formation. Here we review the γ-ray signal arising from dark matter annihilation in the centers of Galactic subhalos. We consider both known Galactic dwarf satellite galaxies and dark clumps without a stellar component as potential sources. Utilizing the Via Lactea II numerical simulation, we estimate fluxes for 18 Galactic dwarf spheroidals with published central densities. The most promising source is Segue 1, followed by Ursa Major II, Ursa Minor, Draco, and Carina. We show that if any of the known Galactic satellites can be detected, then at least ten times more subhalos should be visible, with a significant fraction of them being dark clumps.Michael Kuhlen© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/434390.htmlThe standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter model is considered to be a triumph of theoretical astrophysics but observations of the Milky Way and its system of satellite galaxies irresistibly signal that theory is incomplete on galactic and subgalactic scales. The Stromlo Missing Satellites (SMS) Survey is a critical endeavor to investigate at what level predictions of CDM cosmology are consistent with the observed matter distribution in the Milky Way halo. It will be the deepest, most extended search for optically elusive satellite galaxies to date, covering 20 000 square degrees of sky. The international SMS Survey collaboration will exploit 150 TB of CCD images in six filters acquired by the new SkyMapper telescope of the Australian National University over the next five years, expecting on completion photometric limits 0.5–1.0 mag fainter than the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The primary objective of the program is to characterise the baryonic and dark matter components of a complete sample of MW satellites in the Southern hemisphere to provide stringent observational constraints for improving our understanding of how the Milky Way formed and what physical processes governed galaxy formation and evolution in general.Helmut Jerjen© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2010/285454.htmlThe dwarf galaxy companions to the Milky Way are unique cosmological laboratories. With luminosities as low as 10−7LMW, they inhabit the lowest mass dark matter halos known to host stars and are presently the most direct tracers of the distribution, mass spectrum, and clustering scale of dark matter. Their resolved stellar populations also facilitate detailed studies of their history and mass content. To fully exploit this potential requires a well-defined census of virtually invisible galaxies to the faintest possible limits and to the largest possible distances. I review the past and present impacts of survey astronomy on the census of Milky Way dwarf galaxy companions and discuss the future of finding ultra-faint dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way and beyond in wide-field survey data.Beth Willman© 2010, Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.