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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."
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.
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.
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
...if I find the billion dollar solid titanium asteroid that Planetary Resources is going to harvest?