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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.
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.
I'll help, put me in a rotating spaceship and I'll shoot them down...
-- Make America hate again!
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.
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.
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 : )
...if I find the billion dollar solid titanium asteroid that Planetary Resources is going to harvest?
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.