New Software Helps in Detection of Asteroids
These photos show the relative size of three asteroids that have been imaged at close range by spacecraft. Mathilde (37 x 29 miles) (left) was taken by the NEAR spacecraft on June 27, 1997. Images of the asteroids Gaspra (middle) and Ida (right) were taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1991 and 1993, respectively.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/NEAR and Galileo missions
AUSTIN, Texas (Planetary Resources PR) — A software application based on an algorithm created by a NASA challenge has the potential to increase the number of new asteroid discoveries by amateur astronomers.
Analysis of images taken of our solar system’s main belt asteroids between Mars and Jupiter using the algorithm showed a 15 percent increase in positive identification of new asteroids.
During a panel Sunday at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, NASA representatives discussed how citizen scientists have made a difference in asteroid hunting. They also announced the release of a desktop software application developed by NASA in partnership with Planetary Resources, Inc., of Redmond, Washington. The application is based on an Asteroid Data Hunter-derived algorithm that analyzes images for potential asteroids. It’s a tool that can be used by amateur astronomers and citizen scientists.
The Asteroid Data Hunter challenge was part of NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge. The data hunter contest series, which was conducted in partnership with Planetary Resources under a Space Act Agreement, was announced at the 2014 South by Southwest Festival and concluded in December. The series offered a total of $55,000 in awards for participants to develop significantly improved algorithms to identify asteroids in images captured by ground-based telescopes. The winning solutions of each piece of the contest combined to create an application using the best algorithm that increased the detection sensitivity, minimized the number of false positives, ignored imperfections in the data, and ran effectively on all computer systems.
“The Asteroid Grand Challenge is seeking non-traditional partnerships to bring the citizen science and space enthusiast community into NASA’s work,” said Jason Kessler, program executive for NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge. “The Asteroid Data Hunter challenge has been successful beyond our hopes, creating something that makes a tangible difference to asteroid hunting astronomers and highlights the possibility for more people to play a role in protecting our planet.”
The data hunter challenge incorporated data provided by the Minor Planet Center (MPC), at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and images provided by the Catalina Sky Survey, an astronomical survey project run by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and focused on the discovery and study of near-Earth asteroids and comets.
“We applaud all the participants in the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge. We are extremely encouraged by the algorithm created and it’s already making a difference. This increase in knowledge will help assess more quickly which asteroids are potential threats, human destinations or resource rich,” said Chris Lewicki, president and chief engineer at Planetary Resources. “It has been exciting for our team to work with NASA on this project, and we also look forward to future space-based systems leveraging these results.”
Astronomers find asteroids by taking images of the same place in the sky and looking for star-like objects that move between frames, an approach that has been used since before Pluto was discovered in 1930. With more telescopes scanning the sky, the ever-increasing volume of data makes it impossible for astronomers to verify each detection by hand. This new algorithm gives astronomers the ability to use computers to autonomously and rapidly check the images and determine which objects are suitable for follow up, which leads to finding more asteroids than previously possible.
“The beauty of such archives is that the data doesn’t grow stale, and with novel approaches, techniques and algorithms, they can be harvested for new information. The participants of the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge did just that, probing observations of the night sky for new asteroids that might have slipped through the software cracks the first time the images were analyzed,” said Jose Luis Galache of the MPC. “Moreover, this software can now be used to analyze new images and is available to any observer who wants to use it. The Minor Planet Center applauds these efforts to provide superior tools to all, and looks forward to receiving new asteroid observations generated with them.”
The desktop software application is free and can be used on any basic desktop or laptop computer. Amateur astronomers may take images from their telescopes and analyze them with the application. The application will tell the user whether a matching asteroid record exists and offer a way to report new findings to the Minor Planet Center, which then confirms and archives new discoveries.
Through NASA’s asteroid initiative, the agency seeks to enhance its ongoing work in the identification and characterization of near-Earth objects for further scientific investigation. This work includes locating potentially hazardous asteroids and identifying those viable for redirection to a stable lunar orbit for future exploration by astronauts using NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The Asteroid Grand Challenge, one part of the asteroid initiative, expands the agency’s efforts beyond traditional boundaries and encourages partnerships and collaboration with a variety of organizations.
The algorithm contests were managed and executed by NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI). CoECI was established at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to advance NASA’s open innovation efforts and extend that expertise to other federal agencies. CoECI uses the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) for its advanced algorithmic and software development contests. Through its contract with the Crowd Innovation Lab at Harvard University, NTL uses Appirio’s Crowdsourcing platform powered by Topcoder to enable a community of more than 750,000 designers, developers and data scientists to create the most innovative, efficient and optimized solutions for specific, real-world challenges faced by NASA. Data storage of the Catalina Sky Survey data was provided by Amazon Web Services.
The new asteroid hunting application can be downloaded at:
https://topcoder.com/asteroids
For information about NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge, visit:
11 responses to “New Software Helps in Detection of Asteroids”
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Having some spaceships out there with nuclear devices ready to deflect an impact threat would be nice. How about it NASA?
Out where?
If you can’t figure that out it is not worth trying to explain it to you.
So you don’t know what you meant either.
You obviously intended to mean “out there in space”, but you clearly have no idea what that really means or you wouldn’t have said it.
“Space”, or at least the parts where asteroids are likely to threaten Earth, entails an extraordinary vastness and staggering variability of orbital inclination, velocity, eccentricity.. There’s no place that is “space”, no place to park a nuclear weapons platform that would be useful against incoming asteroids. No ten locations. The array of orbits and energies is equal to the number of asteroids.
Throw in the fact that it’s a violation of the Outer Space Treaty to site nuclear weapons anywhere in space.
“So you don’t know-“
“You obviously intended to mean-“
“-you clearly have no idea-“
The most powerful devices ever created by humankind. I “know” that as a fact.
I “obviously” intended to mean using them to deflect impact threats.
I have an “idea” that having a spaceship ready to intercept and deflect a dinosaur killer is better than not having one.
I explained it but as I stated, I doubt it was worth my trouble.
And you are wrong.
If you don’t know the orbital trajectory of the incoming asteroid, because it’s an unknown threat until its detected, you can’t pre-site a weapons platform in a suitable orbit to reduce the time/energy to reach it.
For example, in your reply to Hug Doug, you mention the moon. However, unless the target asteroid was in the same orbital plane as the Earth/Moon system, you’ve just pissed away around 11km/s of delta-v to gain no benefit. On top of the 5km/s for the launch/landing on the surface.
I know some people get angry when they get told they don’t know enough about something to even make back-of-the-envelope suggestions, but sometimes it’s just something you need to man-up and accept. You need to learn more about orbital mechanics. The basics are not particularly hard, at least if you stick to Newtonian mechanics. It would give you a much better intuition about these kinds of things.
I have an “idea” that having a spaceship ready to intercept and deflect a dinosaur killer is better than not having one.
“And you are wrong.”
Really? Sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.
“-sometimes it’s just something you need to man-up and accept.”
Guess I am not man enough to admit I am wrong.
“Guess I am not man enough to admit I am wrong.”
well, you certainly have repeatedly demonstrated that.
And you have repeatedly demonstrated your need to endlessly argue with and harass me. Don’t cyberstalk me- I will email the moderator and have you banned. You have been warned.
There isn’t anywhere in space that is better suited for positioning nuclear warheads for defending Earth from incoming asteroids than the Earth itself.
The Moon would be a much shallower gravity well from which to launch- and a spaceship would be…..no gravity well at all. There is no more difficult place from which to launch interceptors to deflect an impact threat. Bass ackwards.