"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?

[edmudama]

Article doesn't have a good description.

My guess is you take a bunch of timelapse frames of the same sky.

Then you overlay them at offsets in different directions which would keep any moving objects in the same place.

Picture doing 36000 sequences of overlays:
360 degree variation in 0.1 degree increments at 10 different radial velocities

Most of those sequences will just show blurred gray washout, but if you happened to hit the right direction as a moving object at the right speed, your overlaid image sequence will effectively keep the moving object in the same spot of the frame, which will result in the average brightness for that pixel or pixles to be higher than the surrounding blurs.

Just a guess...

Re:Is it just me?

[Baloroth]

From TFA:

The difficult part of this is knowing which way to shift each image. Shao and co have solved this by brute force: they take consecutive images and examine all possible shifts to see which resolves the fast moving asteroid.

That's a lot of computation (they try 1,000 different velocity vectors), but that's what computers are really, really good at.

Quit spamming for "medium.com"

[Animats]

"Medium.com" is one of those aggregator sites. Don't link to them. Link to the actual paper. Thank you.

They had to use the Palomar 200 inch telescope to make this work. There aren't many big telescopes in the world, and they're booked months in advance. They got a few hours of observing for one night, and good results. But they'd need a lot more observing time on big scopes to do their survey.