Amateur astronomers will now be able to contribute to NASA research. It unveiled Sunday, March 15, at the South by Southwest Festival (SXSWà Austin, Texas, a software to analyze images of the sky and detect for the presence of asteroids.
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A year earlier, at the same festival, NASA launched a competition open to all, with a prize of 55,000 . dollars (52,000 euros) for those who succeed in improving its asteroid detection algorithm A few months later, it was done: thanks to the contributions of the participants, the new algorithm is able to detect 15% more asteroids the previous and produces more reliable data.
Instead of keeping this tool for her, NASA decided to make it accessible to all, on a PC or Mac and “open source”. Entitled ” Data Asteroid Hunter “this software, which is simple to install and use, allows every aspiring astronomer to analyze the images of his own telescope. When an asteroid is detected, the software checks if it has already been discovered and transmits new findings to the Minor Planet Center, a NASA-funded center.
By multiplying the processed data with a tool effective, NASA hopes to significantly increase the number of detected asteroids, but also more quickly identify those who might be a danger to the planet.
This is not the first time that science appeal to the public to help him in his research. By 1999, the program Berkeley Seti @ home allowed each user to provide the power of his computer to analyze data from a radio telescope … to detect any traces of extraterrestrial life. Since 2007, the application Galaxy Zoo offers users to classify galaxies from photos taken by the Hubble telescope . Successfully: the year of its launch, no less than 50 million classifications were performed by more than 150 000
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