Free App Discover Asteroids For NASA !

NASA representatives at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas announced over the weekend that amateur astronomers could more easily help find and track asteroids thanks to a new app.

The Asteroid Data Hunter app can be installed on almost any Windows or Mac computer.

It allows users to analyze images taken with small ground-based telescopes, to identify asteroids that could be of interest to NASA and partner Planetary Resources, though for very different reasons.

The new app is a product of the collaboration between NASA and Planetary Resources known as the Asteroid Grand Challenge.

 This contest was announced early last year and wrapped up in December.

The program offered prizes totaling $55,000 to anyone who could come up with a better algorithm for detecting asteroids in image data captured from ground-based telescopes.

NASA used the winning entries in each of several categories to create the algorithm for Asteroid Data Hunter, which allows it to more easily minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and increase detection sensitivity.

Asteroid detection is still done in more or less the same way it has been for decades. You take several images of the same patch of sky, and look for small star-like objects that change position in each frame.

With enough frames, you can determine where the object is and what its orbit around the sun is.

Some of this can be done entirely by a computer, but people still need to verify the observations, which is where the app comes into play.

 The algorithm used by Asteroid Data Hunter is apparently capable of spotting 15% more objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter thanks to the Asteroid Grand Challenge.

The Asteroid Data Hunter app requires a little experience with astronomy to operate. Additionally, it doesn’t come with data for you to analyze — it’s a tool for amateur astronomers to use in evaluating their own data.

The app is installed on your machine locally, but it runs in a browser window.

 It needs four images to run an analysis and filter out previously discovered objects.

Anything that is legitimately new can be reported immediately to the Minor Planet Center for confirmation.

NASA has an interest in spotting space rocks so it can be aware of potential threats to Earth.

It also has aspirations to redirect an asteroid and place it in orbit around the moon some time in the next few decades — and then send astronauts to land on it, using the currently in-development Space launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft.

Planetary Resources, on the other hand, wants to make science fictional asteroid mining a reality. The mineral wealth in a single medium asteroid could be immense.

Regardless, if you spend your nights peering skyward with a telescope, the Asteroid Data Hunter app can be downloaded for free from Topcoder. The source code is also available on Github.