Extra! Extra! The Daily Minor Planet Needs Your Help Spotting Asteroids
Image credit: Catalina Sky Survey This just in: NASA’s new Daily Minor Planet project seeks your help discovering and tracking asteroids—in a dazzling new data set. Remember asteroids, those lumps of rock tumbling through space left over from the formation of our solar system? There are so many reasons to find these objects. Some asteroids pose an impact hazard to Earth, while others are essential for humanity's endeavor to explore, live, and work in space. Now there's a new way you can help. The Daily Minor Planet project, uses data from the NASA-funded, University of Arizona-based Catalina Sky Survey, which collects more than 1000 images per night. "We take so many images of the sky each night that we cannot possibly look through all of our potential real asteroids," said Carson Fuls, a science engineering specialist for the Catalina Sky Survey who heads the project. At the Daily Minor Planet, you'll decide if the specks...