Hunting Asteroids

Close-up of Eros taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope
Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

In our solar system, there many small rocky objects orbiting around the sun. When these are small, they are referred to as meteoroids; when larger than about 1 meter (3.3 yards), they are referred to as asteroids. There are millions of asteroids in our solar system, and some them -- approximately 89,000 discovered to date -- have trajectories that come near our Earth.

 In June of 2013, NASA announced a project to engage scientists and citizens in helping to "find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them" through a series of challenges, prizes, and crowd-sourcing activities. While the threat of an asteroid may be low on our list of daily worries, a direct collision is something we'd best avoid. As some may recall, in February of 2103, approximately 1500 people were injured and many thousands of buildings were damaged when a small asteroid exploded over Chelybinsk, Russia. So keeping tabs on near-Earth asteroids seems like a good idea, and one purpose of the Asteroid Grand Challenge is to find better ways of doing that.

 Offered by the NASA Tournament Lab via TopCoder, the first in the series of planned challenges, Asteroid Data Hunter, is now underway. This challenge ask participants to "develop significantly improved algorithms to identify asteroids in images captured by ground-based telescopes," specifying that the "winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computer systems."

Meanwhile, NASA has 50-100 volunteer amateur astronomers from around the globe helping to track and characterize asteroids.

Today at NASA's Asteroid Initiative Opportunities Forum, a group of students (shown above with their teacher) from Dillard Drive middle school described how they're participating in the International Astronomical Search Collaboration by hunting for asteroids. They are the only middle school worldwide to be participating in this activity, and today they reported on their accomplishments so far. You can learn more about this by viewing "Dillar Drive students search for asteroids" on YouTube.

As part of the Asteroid Grand Challenge, NASA is looking for ways to increase the number of amateur astronomers observing asteroids.

In addition to hunting asteroids, NASA is exploring ideas for deflecting and redirecting them. Such techniques might be exploited for research and asteroid mining, as well as for protecting our planet from damaging collisions.