Too Many Asteroids To Keep Track Of?

BLAMM! writes: "Space.com has an article explaining how the increase in asteroid detection has outstripped our ability to examine the data. And the problem is only going to get worse. A distributed workload is mentioned as a solution, but only among a few other "astereroid hunter" organizations. It's clear that an abundance of data isn't the only problem, but perhaps an @home type distributed solution would help? Anyone have a contact inside Seti@home? Looking for aliens is cool, but checking asteroids for NEOs is a real-world, in-your-face kind of problem."

Comments

Hogwash. Plz read article next time.

[PD]

The asteroids are already detected, but their orbits are not well known. There's no need to send around bitmaps to compare for moving stars. That step is already completed. The article said that the number of known asteroids will double in the near future, and there are two problems.

1) There are not enough scopes to do followup observations. OK, you geeks. You want hackable hardware? How about you pick up a good Meade telescope with a laptop, CCD, appropriate cables and software, and set up your own asteroid discovery observatory. This is how these asteroids are currently found, regardless of the size of the telescope. A modest 11" scope can do excellent quality science without breaking the bank. You can use this equipment to do followup observations that are needed to track the object, calculate the orbit, and keep it from getting "lost".

2) A small distributed.net style project could possibly be used to do orbit calculations. Orbital mechanics, especially the type involving multiple objects, such as Jupiter, the Earth, and the Sun (maybe mars too) require a lot of horsepower. Running 60,000 asteroids through 100 years of orbit prediction might not require the same effort required to crack a 64-bit RSA key, but it's more than my Celery 300 can handle by itself.