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NASA Wants Your Help Hunting For Asteroids
An anonymous reader writes about new NASA software that can help you become an asteroid hunter. "Since the early 20th century, astronomers have relied on the same technique to detect asteroids — they take images of a section in the sky and look for star-like objects that move between frames. However, with an increase in sensitivity of ground-based telescopes, it has become increasingly difficult for astronomers to sift through the massive pile of data and verify every single detection. In order to increase the frequency of asteroid detection, including of those bodies that could be potential threats to our planet, NASA has released new software, developed in collaboration with Planetary Resources, Inc., capable of running on any standard PC. The software, which can be downloaded for free, will accept images from a telescope and run an algorithm on them to determine celestial bodies that are moving in a manner consistent with an asteroid."
Deep Impact @ Home?
So, it's basically SETI at home, but for asteroids? I remember doing 10,000 units for SETI, on a bunch of 486's I salvaged out of a dumpster that I installed RedHat Linux on... Those were the days....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Everybody works for NASA in the future.
Do we not have to worry the most when the faint objects do *not* move at all, between pictures? Then they are heading straight for us.
You worry when they get bigger.
I'll help, put me in a rotating spaceship and I'll shoot them down...
-- Make America hate again!
Doing what you can with what you got is a lot better than sitting around like a Debbie Downer and acting like a solution isn't a solution if it doesn't cover all possible potential problems...
You know, like you're doing now.
Hell, why even bother to look since we don't have the technology in place to do something about it anyway, right?
I seriously hate people like you. You bring nothing to the table but you feel entitled to feast all the same.
Hell, why even bother to look since we don't have the technology in place to do something about it anyway, right?
Good point!
The earth is not exactly traveling in a straight line you know.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Be Vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting Asteroids!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
topcoder.com just got slashdoted? Or hit by asteroid.
NASA devises botnet scheme to gain renown with future whistle blowers.
Download site for the software is slashdotted.
What if the object starts at an enormous size, and the physical size erodes at the same rate as the angular size increases?
Then the impact will be minimal ?
Well then you know how my wife feels every time I get an erection.
First one to find a UFO wins!
Dear Planetary Resources,
For investing my precious electricity, network bandwidth, and CPU cycles, I'd like a return on resources harvested from any NEO I detect, thanks.
AC
They "say" NASA, but this is really an NSA sponsored program to spy on neighboring asteriods...
Seriously, for those who do run the program, it is like a volunteer tax.
But why not encourage the behavior with positive incentives? It may be better than trying to produce the next wave of cryptocurrency if the offer is right.
Let's face it, it would be bipartisan too.
Hell, why even bother to look since we don't have the technology in place to do something about it anyway, right?
Good point!
IF we can detect one that is in a collision course for earth and we have a decade to do something about it then we could develop the technology.
Sure, there would be the "asteroid deniers" but if the evidence was good enough that people could calculate the trajectory themself and show
that it had a high probability of wiping us out then we could do something about it.
Ah, but we do. We've landed probes on comets already, if we spot an asteroid that will impact the Earth in 20-50 years (orbital mechanics - one of the few fields where we really can see into the future with high accuracy) we could land a probe on it and fire all thrusters on full until out of fuel, deflecting it's path just enough so that it misses the Earth instead of hitting it. At a range of several billion miles it doesn't take much deflection to miss a target as small as the Earth.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We've landed probes on comets already
That's not landing! That's crashing with style.
Seriously, yes, you are right. Can't hurt to know what's coming, and then decide what to do about it.
around Uranus yet?
As DSI and PR get up to speed, we're going to have an avalanche of data to process. As long as they're willing to give back, I'm happy to donate some CPU time to their efforts.
But there's a whole 'nuther layer of potential... having amateur astronomers net-link their instruments to the overall effort... what kind of pinpoints could we arrive at by crunching the numbers from thousands of points on our globe?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Please accept this home software which will communicate directly with our servers in Fort Meade. We assure you it's just helping us look for asteroids.
Also, if you have moved the location of your Photos directory, please enter it's current location in the install wizard. Thanks for your help ... looking for asteroids.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
A) Is there any way to prove to a third party that these math problems have been issued by NASA - does NASA sign them or anything like that?
B) Is it easier to verify the solution than it is to compute?
It would be awesome if I could donate $10 (or a bitcoin, whatever) towards asteroid detection. IMHO much more practical than SETI@Home.
...if I find the billion dollar solid titanium asteroid that Planetary Resources is going to harvest?
Sure, there would be the "asteroid deniers" but if the evidence was good enough that people could calculate the trajectory themself and show
that it had a high probability of wiping us out then we could do something about it.
Yes, because we know that the deniers can be swayed by an overabundance of evidence, and that they always seek to find answers for themselves instead of blindly parroting conspiracy-blog talking points!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Of course it isn't. It's the center of the universe, everyone knows that.
Do we not have to worry the most when the faint objects do *not* move at all, between pictures? Then they are heading straight for us.
Incorrect, we are judging their movement as compared to the background stars, which are (relatively) fixed in position while we move. An object on collision course with us will not be heading straight the position we are at when it is observed, but it's trajectory will have to carry it into the path of our orbit, at the same time that we occupy that same point. If an object appears in the same fixed position as the starts around it, it is either too distant to concern us, or it is in a concentric orbit at the same angular velocity as us and not an issue (although this would be an extremely interesting discovery).
Even something on a perfect spiral trajectory on the elliptical and matching our angular velocity would be detectable due to observations at different times of the night (as we rotate around the Earth's axis) and the different Doppler shift compared to much more distant stars.
The constant 'Pew-Pew-Pew' sounds would keep me awake at night.
Not everyone needs to agree with you for you to take action. Too many people are up in arms about what the "deniers" and such are doing. These people rarely have little skin in the game and do little more than complain.
Stop letting the opinions of others be your excuse.
I'm hunting asteroids
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
pretty sure it would still move against the background stars which is what you are looking for.
It seems a waste of programming effort that this distributed project, like many others, choose to use boinc. I also believe that this kind of image processing would be suitable for GPUs, right? That would be nice since there are note very many worth-while GPU projects on boinc right now.
The software is actually located at this address: http://www.topcoder.com/astero...
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Yes, because we know that the deniers can be swayed by an overabundance of evidence, and that they always seek to find answers for themselves instead of blindly parroting conspiracy-blog talking points!
You wouldn't need 100% agreement and also stopping an asteroid is in some ways easier
than stopping climate change. Stopping an asteroid is mostly technical while stopping climate
change has a fair amount of political. Stopping climate change requires some amount on consensus
to make it happen. Also, stopping climate change has alot of people who make money from
polution wanting to resist doing anything about it. Stopping an asteroid on the other hand
would have alot of people with money potentially profiting off of it. Mainly, the aerospace industry
could potentially profit quite a bit as well as the insurance companies while very few people
have any incentive to try to resist attempting to prevent an asteroid strike.
I was using software like this 20 years ago. What the hell were they waiting on?
Why doesn't the FCC just re-classify our home computers as a public utility and FORCE it to happen?
aren't asteroids allowed privacy too?
A few years ago I found another project that was doing this. They used a camera that shot an image on each of the RGB channels. So the image at 0 seconds was on red, 2 seconds on green, 4 on blue, or whatever their timer count was.
The user end app was a java monstrosity that I didn't want on my machine. So I made a single line script in Linux to do what it did.
It used convert to split the image into it's RGB components, saved them sequentially, then reassembled them as a three frame GIF.
Then you could see the movement of the asteroid upon a background of static stars.
I called it "rockspotter".
Stopping an asteroid, unless you have an absolutely huge amount of warning time beforehand (in which case a fairly cheap probe with a small thruster should be enough to move it enough to not be a risk), requires a large amount of resources and money to build something large enough to actually do the job. The deniers don't want to spend money on anything in space, they want to spend it on defense contractors (who don't make spacecraft).
That's fine if you have 50 years of warning. If you only have 2 years, however, you're going to need a much, much, much more powerful probe, probably something with nuclear engines. Good luck getting enough agreement and funding to pull that one off in time.
I know, and neither are the other objects.
If they want wide adoption of this, they're going to have to make it more plug&play, at least on Windows.
When I went to install, it's a .bat file -- that you have to run as admin if you want to install it in program files. From the start, that will filter out a lot of possible users and leave the others with the sense to run as admin feeling a little leery about the program.
After installing, you have to again click a "start.bat" (via the instructions) or it makes a shortcut to the .bat file you can click. Which opens up a command prompt and runs some java stuff that scrolls by, then opens your browser to a local "dashboard" page.
From there you're supposed to, I guess manually download data, and browse to it, and finally start processing it. But this isn't really explained clearly in the instructions, and ought to honestly be part of the program that just happens.
Maybe I'm missing something, I didn't spend a lot of time on it, it's just, when I used to run SETI or Folding, you download, install, and run, and bam, it just worked. Which I feel is crucial for a distributed computing project. Maybe this is a prototype/proof of concept and the next step will polish it up so it can be put to use without a lot of babysitting.
Nothing like condemning someone for what you assume they must think.
On the chance that you're interested in facts--as opposed to your opinions--here's an article at a skeptic's website about the danger from asteroids: http://wattsupwiththat.com/201.... You'll notice that the author (and most of the respondents) take the asteroid threat seriously, e.g. "I really do think there is more of a threat from space, than there is from CO2." You can search for "asteroid" at the website and come up with more articles about the threat.
"celestial bodies that are moving in a manner consistent with an asteroid": and if it's moving relative to the stellar background, but not in a way that's consistent with an asteroid? I suppose that would mean it's a comet. But it would be interesting if it were something else...
Do we not have to worry the most when the faint objects do *not* move at all, between pictures? Then they are heading straight for us.
If we find an object that stationary to the starry background while being in our solar system we need to send a probe there, ASAP. It would be a clear cut indication of alien technology in our solar system.
If we find an object that is not moving with respect to us we need not worry. It is simply in a geostationary orbit. There are many objects there.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Exactly - which is why we should start looking NOW. If we find something major on a 2-year collision course then, well, there's not much we can do except maybe analyze the path long enough to get good enough idea where it will hit so we can evacuate the impact area and/or prepare for "nuclear" winter. But if we find a collision 20-50 years out we've got lots of time to do something about it, including developing any necessary technology if it's beyond what we can currently deal with.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yes, Lockheed and Boeing have very little in the way of aerospace assets or missile technology. They would HATE a $100 billion crash program to shoot something out of the sky.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yeah, but if we were smart (which we aren't), we'd be putting some resources into developing methods to counter such threats now (technologies which would also be useful for other missions, such as asteroid capture for mining, or for traveling to other places in the solar system more quickly), instead of just waiting to see something.
Also, it seems to me we'd do better with actual probes in space looking for these things, instead of relying on ground-based observations. Wouldn't it be better to have a space-based probe, perhaps closer to the orbit of Venus, to look away from the Sun for asteroids, seeing them by the light reflecting from the Sun?
Terrestrial missile and aerospace technology really isn't all that useful in the vacuum of space. Their technology all depends on the presence of oxygen-bearing air. Jet engines don't work in space.
To my knowledge, neither Lockheed nor Boeing have any capability of building rocket engines. The main US makers are Aerojet Rocketdyne and probably now SpaceX. There is ULA, which is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed, but they can't make engines, they have to get them from the Russians.
Spend about 15 minutes on Wikipedia and then come back and re-read your comment.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That's where I read about ULA. I'm sorry, buying engines from the Russians doesn't count.
There's always an opportunity cost with any endeavor - sure, we *could* invest lots of resources in developing asteroid deflection technologies, but it's been thousands of years since a really devastating impact, and could be thousands more before the next, in which case any resources dedicated today are wasted. Yes, they might have other applications, but as much as I wish otherwise, realistically we're probably at least a century or two out from any sort of cost-effective space exploitation beyond orbit, and cataclysmic-asteroid-moving technology is unlikely to help much in that regard, unless it was getting the sort of funding inspired by a confirmed impending cataclysm. (How might ion drive technology improve with a a few extra $billion per year in funding?)
And most certainly space telescopes would be more effective, but they're also far, far more expensive, and we already ave a vast array of ground based telescopes that should serve perfectly well for detecting cataclysm-sized asteroids. Including several being built specifically for asteroid-mapping. Again, it's a question of opportunity costs - an array of ground-based asteroid detection telescopes, or one space-based scope. The space-based scope will be able to detect smaller asteroids, but the array will be able to map a much larger swath of the sky far more quickly. For early-alert purposes it's a no-brainer.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You mentioned Aerojet Rocketdyne in your message. They are in CA, and it is where the Delta IV main engines are manufactured. Only the Atlas V uses the Russian engine. Anyway, since when does Lockheed or Boeing need to make every single part of something in order to profit enormously from it? They would be the natural recipients of a "giant space missile" contract. They regularly do space launches, build rockets, build satellites and space probes, and integrate navigation systems. They also make all of the nuclear missiles that we have in our inventory (Trident II is Lockheed, Tomahawk is Boeing).
In any case, I would hope that Russian help would also be forthcoming in any big expensive plan to save humanity.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
but it's been thousands of years since a really devastating impact, and could be thousands more before the next, in which case any resources dedicated today are wasted. Yes, they might have other applications,
That's my point: we need to be developing space-going capabilities; these resources wouldn't be wasted, they'd contribute to our capabilities. A big-ass rocket engine for pushing asteroids (or whatever kind of engine they end up using, mass driver, ion thruster, whatever) wouldn't only be useful for pushing killer asteroids to safer orbits, it'd also be useful for other things, like pushing valuable asteroids to places where they're easier to harvest, or pushing big-ass spacecraft on long voyages to Jupiter or wherever. You're not going to have a 6-month expedition to Jupiter on the Discovery with HAL with current propulsion technology.
Realistically we're probably at least a century or two out from any sort of cost-effective space exploitation beyond orbit, and cataclysmic-asteroid-moving technology is unlikely to help much in that regard,
Sure it would: if we had the technology to push big things around in space better, it'd be a lot cheaper to do anything large-scale up there, including long-distance exploration. Right now, we're basically still using rocket engines from the 1960s.
(How might ion drive technology improve with a a few extra $billion per year in funding?)
Exactly. Or fusion engines. Whatever it is, it needs money, and time to develop it. We're spending far, far, far more than a few billion a year on "defense" projects like the completely inept F-35.
You are assuming the ability to push big things around would be cost effective - an assumption for which I see no basis. Consider the moving platform for the space shuttle - it does the job, but its fuel consumption per ton-mile is probably horrible.
Yes, there would be lots of long-term benefits to being able to push asteroids around - but at present we don't really have the technology to (1) identify valuable asteroids (2) mine them, or (3) do any of that more cheaply than we could mine the resources here on Earth. Which makes it horribly premature to be worrying about the details of how to move the things around - by the time 1,2,and 3 are viable, we'll likely have made far greater advances in ion drive technology which will make the leisurely repositioning of asteroids much more cost effective.
Meanwhile for diverting an imminent planet-killer, nuclear rocketry would probably be the current go-to technology - and frankly I think that's a needlessly dangerous technology to develop at this time, considering the global conflicts likely to erupt over the course of the next century or so (consider, the first serious nuclear rocket research was done with the specific intent of flying the thing around enemy territory to pollute their environment)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I started a proof-of-concept project using inexpensive cameras operating autonomously to collect data and then use that to distribute to BOINC clients. My problem was the plate solving methods - the math was just a bit above my level. It CAN be done and there would be a huge number of astronomical objects to watch for: meteors; asteroids; novae; etc...