NASA advantage of the South by Southwest festival to unveil a new software for PC and Mac users. The objective is to help the agency analyze space data received to detect new asteroids, by involving amateur astronomers.
“ Become a hunter asteroid “the proposal attractive is that of NASA. The space agency has just put online Data Asteroid Hunter, software for computers running Windows and Mac OS – and soon Linux. – For using the unused computing power of the machine to analyze data from amateur telescopes
The software was created through a partnership with Planetary Resource, a US company aimed to map asteroids accessible and rich in mineral resources. The algorithm developed for the occasion is supposed to identify “ asteroid 15% more compared to current methods “, which is between Mars and Jupiter in the main belt.
Data Asteroid Hunter can recall the SETI Institute’s approach: that assist in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, since 1999, through software. However, NASA’s approach really caters to “citizens amateur astronomers and scientists” to analyze the data are not provided, so you have to have a sufficiently powerful telescope to afford to have images to be analyzed.
The software is used for a little over a year internally at NASA, and the agency hopes that the public offering from now, it will motivate amateurs to assist in the search for new asteroids.
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