Asteroid Imagery Sharing

2014 Challenge


  • Hashtags:

    #asteroid, #asteroidimagery

    Contact:

    [email protected]

    Tags:

    Citizen Science, Platform, Imagery


    Challenge Description

    Design an open-source platform for sharing crowd-sourced asteroid imagery—including observations that have already have been logged, as well as newly observed Near Earth Objects. Consider integrating tools to make it easy for amateur astronomers around the world to contribute both primary and follow-up imagery. Imagery is most accessible to the general public when calibrated with astrometric and photometric reductions, then incorporated into an authoritative data set. Having access to this data set enables global citizens to help identify and characterize potentially dangerous Near Earth Objects.

    Background

    In June 2013, NASA announced a grand challenge to “find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them.” This Grand Challenge expands the role of individual inventors, tinkerers, citizen scientists, developers and technologists. Asteroids pose the threat of impact, while presenting an opportunity to expand our knowledge of this natural phenomenon. The Grand Challenge seeks to shine a spotlight on asteroids, and garner global participation in providing impact prevention solutions.

    Many of the millions of yet undiscovered Near Earth Objects require space-based hardware or large professional scopes to locate. Once identified, amateurs can perform useful follow-up observations on estimated composition, albedo, rotation, and other characteristics of these objects. No mechanism currently exists for amateurs to easily and effectively share imagery in a way that contributes to the collective picture of the threat of asteroids from space.

    The Minor Planet Center currently acts as the central clearinghouse for Asteroid observations taken as data from professional and amateur telescopes, and space-based telescopes such as NASA’s WISE. This astrometric data allows the calculation of orbits for the asteroids so both professionals and amateurs may conduct follow-up observations.

    Once published on the Minor Planet Center’s website, amateurs can then follow-up to make their own observations and create imagery. You may consider streamlining the transfer of data from the Minor Planet Center and your application, facilitating a seamless experience for users.

    Amateur Astronomers currently use free web tools, to share and discuss their images taken of celestial objects from around the globe; but no tool exists to encourage a high-level of use. Also, if not properly calibrated, the scientific value of this imagery is limited. Crowdsourced, properly calibrated, follow up observation imagery of Near Earth Asteroids that are shared and stored in the same location could accelerate the scientific understanding of asteroid threats to our planet.

    Details

    Be open-source with documentation for others to build on:

    • All source code and documentation must be posted onto GitHub and or Hackpad

    • Any open source tools or APIs used to enable your solution must be cited

    • Specify what data sets/sources are being used if the library is pulling in existing sources of imagery

    Sample resources


  • The following projects are solving this challenge:

    • Astrack

      Astrack is a site that hosts pictures and tracking data of an asteroid, such as estimated composition, albedo, rotation, and other characteristics of these objects, each asteroid will have a separate page where individuals can see and share images, and discuss about them. Visit Project

    • Constelatio

      Constelatio is a web application allowing users to share their most recent NEOs imagery, with observation data as well. Users will be able to upload and comment the images. We also provide a interactive orbital visualisation tool from asteroids' observation data fetched from our database. We a... Visit Project

    • Astroapp

      asteroid image sharing app Visit Project

    • Astrodeo

      Astrodeo aims to empower amateur and professional astrophotographers to upload and share their asteroid images. With our low barrier of user signup anyone can get started uploading and sharing in minutes. Accounts with Astrodeo not only serve as social portfolios but also can leverage data to ass... Visit Project

    • Astroidshare for iPhone

      # Astroidshare for iPhone App for share the images from Asteroids for iPhone. This app is for iPhone, we work with Astroidshare, a platform with Django. Visit Project

    • AstroMap

      The core mission of AstroMap is to essentially create a photo-sharing platform where information is crowd-sourced from people all over the world. Through creating a back-end that feeds the coordinate data of moving objects in space, along with pictures from NASA and users, we can create a trackin... Visit Project

    • astroidshare

      Simple platform for sharing crowd-sourced asteroid imagery Visit Project

    • SkyShare

      Este proyecto permite la interacción de usuarios aficionados ,instituciones compartir información acerca de los eventos en torno al tema de Astronomia. Un servicio web se encarga de controlar los datos de usuarios putEvento, getEvento son metodos basicos que permiten la interaccion. El proyec... Visit Project

    • NERO Project

      ![Alt text](http://uncommonsense.com/insights_images/nero_01.png) Our Mission ======== We want to empower the over 20 million DSLR camera owners around the world to become citizen scientists, collecting and contributing data to an artificial intelligence platform capable of detecting aster... Visit Project

    • Halley's Hitchhikers

      Our project hopes to excite and educate people of all ages by showing the actual data for detectable asteroids. As more data becomes available the objects, images, speeds and relative location will automatically populate. By allowing users to grab and rotate asteroids, we hope to increase interes... Visit Project

    • AndroidShare

      a short gallery about asteroids and a kind of filter to recognize the form of them and discard images that are not!. Visit Project

    • Pictroid

      ![Pictroid](https://d13yacurqjgara.cloudfront.net/users/200161/screenshots/1564635/pictroid_logo.png) ## Team - Habib Rehman (Manager | Front-end | Back-end) - Joshua Smith (Front-end) - Jack Doiron (Back-end) ## Winner of the "Best Use of Data" Award for Virtual International Participatio... Visit Project

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