Public asked to help label features on Pluto

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto in July, people of the public will be able to name different features of the planet that they see in the images portrayed by the craft.  Since this will be the first time Pluto has ever been mapped, the New Horizons team is asking for your help in coming up with names.  The public will be able to suggest names for certain features by going to http://ourpluto.seti.org and everyone will vote to decide which names are the best.  “Pluto belongs to everyone,” said Mark Showalter from the SETI Institute. “So we want everyone to be involved in making the map of this distant world.”  Currently, the images we have of Pluto are distant and lack much detail, but after the flyby, we will learn much more about the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon.  “The difference is that last time we only needed two names, whereas now we could need more than a hundred,” Showalter notes. “We are eager to gather recommendations from people all over the world.” The website also includes an extremely simple ballot to allow young children to participate.

Citation: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2015/03/public-asked-to-help-name-features-on-pluto

Application for asteroid hunting

A new computer application has been produced to aid astronomers in discovering more asteroids in our solar system.  This software enables any ordinary astronomy enthusiasts to discover asteroids, which has greatly helped NASA with their quest to detect more of them.  NASA created this incredible, new application using an algorithm that scans photos from telescopes, detecting any possible asteroids in the images.  This algorithm came from the Asteroid Data Hunter contest, which NASA launched in March of 2014.  In this contest, participants created their own algorithms to best detect asteroids in images that they took and in the end, the best parts of the algorithms were pooled to create the application. “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 of 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.”  Instead of searching for asteroids by hand using the old method, now, the application quickly scans multiple photos, determining whether any possible asteroids are present in the images.  The best part about the application- it’s free!    

Citation: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2015/03/new-desktop-application-has-potential-to-increase-asteroid-detection

Citation 2: http://www.topcoder.com/asteroids/asteroiddatahunter/