NASA Wants Your Help Hunting For Asteroids 85
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."
Where can I download... (Score:5, Funny)
Deep Impact @ Home?
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This good be big with Americans, depending on what kind of guns they'll let us use.
They mis-spelled NSA (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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I was thinking more along these lines...
I need NASA to make a ship, preferably a pinkish-orangish color, triangular in shape. It only has yaw and forward thrusters.
Then I need a cannon which takes asteroids and breaks them in to exactly half sized asteroids and alters their momentum.
Then I need NASA to have this ship generate a space-time wrap such than any asteroids I shoot will be looped back into a 2 dimensional plane finite sized plane about 50 ship-lengths long.
I also needs NASA to allow this ship to t
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I propose to add some pew-pew noises.
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be vewwwy vewwwy qwietttttt... (Score:2)
I'm hunting asteroids
Asteroid at home? (Score:3)
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....
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Actually, this is more geared towards people gathering the data and then analyzing it themselves
not a large amount of people analyzing a central pool of data.
Re: Imagine where this could lead... (Score:4, Interesting)
As DSI [deepspaceindustries.com] and PR [planetaryresources.com] 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?
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Still objects more dangerous than moving objects? (Score:4, Interesting)
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You worry when they get bigger.
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What if the object starts at an enormous size, and the physical size erodes at the same rate as the angular size increases?
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Then the impact will be minimal ?
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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.
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Hell, why even bother to look since we don't have the technology in place to do something about it anyway, right?
Good point!
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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.
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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!
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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 profitin
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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).
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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.
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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.
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Spend about 15 minutes on Wikipedia and then come back and re-read your comment.
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That's where I read about ULA. I'm sorry, buying engines from the Russians doesn't count.
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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
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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... [wattsupwiththat.com]. 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 article
Re:Still objects more dangerous than moving object (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 spac
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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,
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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
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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
Re:Still objects more dangerous than moving object (Score:4, Informative)
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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 t
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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.
Dejavu (Score:2)
Asteroids (Score:3)
Be Vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting Asteroids!
NSA Envy (Score:2)
Winner! (Score:1)
First one to find a UFO wins!
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no, then Men in Black coem adn baet teh stars out of yuo, and yuo cant' tpye wroth a dman forr monhts. Turst mme o n thsi.
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Have they looked.... (Score:2)
Do I get a cut...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Do I get a cut...? (Score:4, Funny)
Only if you can land it gently.
Pass (Score:2)
Why on earth not based on boinc? (Score:1)
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Wrong link (Score:2)
The software is actually located at this address: http://www.topcoder.com/astero... [topcoder.com]
Saw this in another project previously (Score:2)
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 t
Non intuitive, java based (Score:1)
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 clic
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movement (Score:1)
"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...
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Comets obey the same laws of orbital mechanics. They just have really eccentric orbits.
Now if the objects do not behave according to the laws of orbital mechanics, then that is interesting in another field.
However, this software probably looks for predictable semilinear motion (wrt the starry background) over a couple of weeks. If such a motion is detected the images will probably be flagged for manual check. This filters out false positives. Looking for non-predictable motion would introduce many false pos