How'd you like to be an "Asteroid Hunter"? Of course, you would and NASA has got an app that will make this happen.
NASA's desktop and laptop app recruits people to help identify asteroids from telescope photography using a special asteroid algorithm. It's available for free download on Windows and Apple.
Scientists announced the desktop and laptop app at the ongoing SXSW 2015 (South by Southwest) music, cultural and tech fair at Austin, Texas during a panel discussion.
The app encourages everyone to take part in discovering next asteroid that could obliterate our planet. It works on the back of an algorithm developed for NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge competition launched at SXSW 2014.
The basic concept is to take photos of the same place in the sky above and observe cosmic objects that move from another frame to the next. The algorithm deciphers and sifts through a specific bright spot in the night sky that seems to have movement, said Endgadget.
There's a tremendous amount of data from telescopes impossible for humans to handle alone, especially when it involves scanning the night sky for flying objects. This algorithm enables the app to narrow down this data and choose the most likely candidate for an asteroid sighting.
Anyone that's installed the app can upload their own images from their telescopes to confirm if there's an actual asteroid.
"The beauty of such archives is that the data doesn't grow stale, and with novel approaches, techniques and algorithms, they can be harvested for new information. The participants of the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge did just that, probing observations of the night sky for new asteroids that might have slipped through the software cracks the first time the images were analyzed," said Jose Luis Galache of the Minor Planet Center.
You can be an Asteroid Hunter by downloading the app here.