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/