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 asteroids within seconds. Imagine millions of cameras focused on the night sky, keeping watch, keeping us informed, keeping us safe.

Our Process

The NERO Project helps photographers learn about astrophotography and how you can use your DSLR camera to capture night sky images as a citizen scientist. Then with our DSLR Field Guide, we'll help photographers extend their equipment's astrophotography capabilities. After submitting photos, the system will auto-locate, categorize and attribute your images. Once our AI platform is activated, your photos will be analyzed to detect anomalies that will indicate a potential asteroid threat.

Technical Approach

The NERO Project utilizes a suite of modern web-technologies to build a platform for Citizen Scientists to become educated on astrophotography and provide valuable data to the scientific community. This platform is built on an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance that is designed for rapid scalability of raw image types and meta-data processing. Core technologies include Angular.js, HTML/5, CSS/3, Google's GO programming language, and responsive web design practices. Additionally, the platform is also designed to properly capture the scientific data necessary to ultimately build out a computational intelligence engine that will auto-detect Near Earth Objects (NEOs). More technical details can be found at on the NERO Project site.

Field Guide

Download our DSLR Field Guide to learn how to shoot photos that can be submitted to the NERO Project website.

Access to NERO

Help empower and activate our international team of citizen scientists by visiting the NERO Project website. Learn more about the NERO Project by watching this video.

Project Information

Resources