The National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States of America (NASA) seeks help in finding and tracking asteroids through “The Daily Minor Planet” project.
Using data provided by the Catalina Sky Survey, a research program run by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, the project aims to have people view a series of images and rate whether or not they are real asteroids.
Once users analyze the images on the website, the platform allows them to answer “whether the particles of light in the images resemble real celestial objects or instead result from poorly timed ‘glows’ from a background full of stars”. Mistaken identity.” , dust on the mirror of the telescope, or other reasons”.
In addition, Internet users will be able to write a comment to generate a conversation with other participants or move on to the next set of images to continue the analysis.
“Responses will be saved for the research team as they work” on the new findings, the website reports.
“We take so many pictures of the sky every night that we can’t see through all of our potentially real asteroids… I thought it would be great if people could do what we do every night,” Carson Fuls said a science engineering specialist with the Catalina Sky Survey, which runs the initiative.
This new Daily Minor Planet Project replaces a previous one called the Catalina Outer Solar System Survey, which is now complete.
Regarding the Catalina Sky Survey, it is a NASA-funded initiative dedicated to the discovery and tracking of near-Earth asteroids. Since 1998, it has discovered thousands of near-Earth asteroids and many other main belt asteroids.
As detailed on their website, “Although they have state-of-the-art cameras, detection software and a small team of full-time professional observers, they do not have the capacity to identify and verify all objects of interest,” so it Tha put platform is available for those willing to collaborate.
