Humans have difficult relationships with asteroids. Take a cultural study of films like Armageddon, and you can see we're terrified of one sneaking undetected into a path with Earth.
To be more asteroid conscious, a new citizen science project called Asteroid Zoo asks you, the peaceful citizens of planet Earth, to lend your hands in finding in the depths of space.
The project pulls night sky photo series from the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Ariz., and asks users to identify how many asteroids, if any, are in the frames.
Its purpose is twofold: One, to help researchers find asteroids that may potentially collide with our planet down the road; and two, to find good mining candidates for future space exploration.
"What we're really doing is verifying the performance of what the computer is doing. In this case, taking raw data from our telescopes and putting them into a citizen science tool," says Chris Lewicki, president and chief engineer at asteroid-mining firm Planetary Resources.
His group, along with citizen science giant Zooniverse, created the project.
If the game sounds easy, it's not. Most of the images look like this:
When you click "play," it runs through a series of four pictures; if you see an object move between frames, you can mark it as an asteroid. A lot of the movements are minimal and tough to detect. Keen eyes, as they say, are key.
"There are about three million images total in the data set. And that increases every day," Lewicki says. "This is a way to get extra eyes on these images and make sure nothing's been overlooked."
Interest in asteroids â€" at least from the public â€" has been on the rise over the past year. When a space rock exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013, the scientific community was mystified. Nobody saw it coming.
Most ground telescopes detect about 1,000 near-Earth asteroids per year. NASA and other observatories believe they know the whereabouts of 90% of nearby asteroids that are one kilometer or larger in diameter. But smaller ones, like the 18-meter-round rock that exploded above Chelyabinsk, can still slip through their radar undetected.
Lewicki says Asteroid Zoo isn't meant to be a scare tactic. His group's main mission â€" as their title less-than-subtly suggests â€" is to utilize asteroids as resources, not enemies.
Jenn Gustetic is a prizes and challenges program executive at NASA's Asteroid Data Hunter contest. The challenge, which partners with TopCoder, aims to use crowdsourcing to improve detection imagery software most observatories use with their telescopes.
Their goal is to collect ideas from coders across the world, all via mini-contests, and merge the best proposals together into a software for astronomers and observatories to use. Gustetic is hopeful about the mining potential.
"From our perspective, we see asteroids as potential destinations throughout the solar system," she says. "For the deep space industry, they're really seen as potential resources for deep space exploration."
Imagine trying to drive from San Francisco to Boston with all your car's fuel stored inside, she says. It's the same way we treat space exploration. If we can find a way to take resources from outside our planet, we'll be able to go a lot deeper into the unknown. Knowing where nearby asteroids are is a start.
"Everything we've created on this planet is made from other things also on this planet. We make resources out of what's available around us," she says.
"With asteroids, who knows what we'll be able to mine? Water, metal, potential elements we can use for propellants? This would take humans much farther into space."
For now, she says, we can continue keeping our eyes to the sky on our computer screens. Projects like Asteroid Zoo and the Data Challenge are ways for everyone to dabble in rocket science.
Engage.
Try Asteroid Zoo for yourself here; and stay up to date on NASA's coding challenges here.
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