"Synthetic Tracking" Makes It Possible to Find Millions of Near Earth Asteroids

KentuckyFC writes "Astronomers think that near-Earth Asteroids the size of apartment blocks number in the millions. And yet they spot new ones at the rate of only about 30 a year because these objects are so faint and fast moving. Now astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have developed a technique called synthetic tracking for dramatically speeding up asteroid discovery. Insteads of long exposures in which near-Earth asteroids show up as faint streaks, the new technique involves taking lots of short exposures and adding them together in a special automated way. The trick is to shift each image so that the pixels that record the asteroid are superimposed on top of each other. The result is an image in which the asteroid is sharp point of light against a background of star streaks. They say synthetic tracking has the capability to spot 80 new near Earth asteroids each night using a standard 5 metre telescope. That'll be handy for spotting rocks heading our way before they get too close and for identifying targets for NASA's future asteroid missions."

Comments

Is it just me?

[Score Whore]

Or does the submitter not see the apparent logical flaw in the way the described this process. If you're going to line up each image so that the asteroid is a single sharp pixel and the stars are streaks, doesn't that suggest that you already know which pixel is the asteroid? In which case you don't really need to search for that particular asteroid, no?

At a minimum the submitter or the editors need to think whether their description of the procedure is good.

Re:Is it just me?

[kruach aum]

"If it were moving at speed v, it would show up when I shifted the pictures by x pixels." Repeat for likely ranges of v, watch for bright spots. No contradictions required.

Re:Is it just me?

[mdielmann]

Sometimes the best way to solve a big problem is to just get a bigger hammer.

I had a problem once that I could probably have solved using some very pretty, complex, elegant formula. But after examining the problem space, I figured I could brute-force it, with a basic fitness algorithm, in about 2 seconds. The overall process it was a part of took between 90 and 300 seconds. The other benefits were, it was quite readable, and didn't require any advanced math or knowledge of the problem to see what was being done. The fact that the pretty formula would have improved performance at most about 2% made it an easy choice.