NEW YORK: According to a NASA statement, NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge has released a new software application that will enable members of the public to find a higher number of asteroids.
Thanks to the large battery of telescopes operating today, many more observations are possible. However, there are far more images than professional astronomers could ever examine, looking for objects that move between frames taken of the same area of space, the telltale signature of an asteroid.
NASA created the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge, part of its Asteroid Grand Challenge, as a means of engaging citizen scientists and enabling them to join the search for unidentified asteroids. The challenge, which concluded in December 2014, invited contestants to develop new algorithms to search for asteroids in images obtained by Earth-bound telescopes. Asteroid Data Hunter used data from the Minor Planet Center of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics and images captured by the Catalina Sky Survey carried out by the University of Arizona, Tucson.
The winning algorithm has been incorporated into the new application, increasing the program’s sensitivity, keeping the number of false positives to a low, disregarding data artifacts, and running on all operating systems. With the new application, amateur astronomers can analyze images from their own telescopes and determine whether a matching asteroid already is known. If the object has not previously been recognized, the application allows the user to send the discovery to the Minor Planet Center for confirmation.
“The beauty of such archives is that the data doesn’t grow stale, and with novel approaches, techniques and algorithms, they can be harvested for new information. The participants of the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge did just that, probing observations of the night sky for new asteroids that might have slipped through the software cracks the first time the images were analyzed,” said Jose Luis Galache of the Minor Planet Center. “Moreover, this software can now be used to analyze new images and is available to any observer who wants to use it. The Minor Planet Center applauds these efforts to provide superior tools to all, and looks forward to receiving new asteroid observations generated with them.”
NASA’s efforts to foster citizen science in its search for asteroids are part of its larger plans to identify potentially dangerous objects and its asteroid redirection mission, which will bring a space rock into a stable orbit of the Moon as a prelude to manned exploration.
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