OUR NASA he asks for help from everyone who is his fan Space to detect asteroids through thousands of data.

This is the Daily Minor Planet Project, which invites everyone to look at a series of images and decide if the patches of light look like asteroids, those pieces of rock that fall into space as remnants of the formation of the Sun in our System, or if instead they are false detections due to twinkling background stars, dust on the telescope mirror, or other causes.

Volunteers visit the site www.zooniverse.org and, after viewing a series of images, answer yes or no as to whether they see asteroids in them. They can also write comments or share thoughts and information with other members.

Look! High in the sky! It’s a bird! This is a plane! Is that… an asteroid?! Okay, okay, you can’t just look for asteroids, but you *can* help our new Daily Minor Planet project identify them from a huge collection of images. Let’s make news: https://t.co/jrPp7oBO8N pic.twitter.com/bxyJLexsfW

— NASA Citizen Science (@DoNASAScience) May 16, 2023

The images they are asked to evaluate are from the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey astronomy program funded by NASA. The program gathers more than 1,000 images each night at the Steward Observatory in Arizona. These images are added daily to the site.

This sheer volume of images being collected makes it difficult for researchers who are turning to the public for help in detecting near-Earth (near-Earth) asteroids that “escape” the detection system.

Asteroid detection software can detect potential asteroids, but scientists note that many of these detections are false positives. In fact, it is estimated that only 1% of the images presented to users depict actual asteroids.

“We take so many sky shots every night that it’s impossible to look through them all for potential asteroids,” said Carson Fools, program manager for the Catalina Sky Survey. “I thought it would be great if people could do what we do every night. This site opens doors. Want to look for asteroids too? If yes, then come in, ”he adds.

Significance of Asteroid Detection

Larger asteroids reflect more light and have been detected by scientists, but smaller ones are more numerous and harder to detect. Most of the asteroids in the Solar System are found in the Main Belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Most often, these asteroids orbit the Sun harmlessly, never crossing the orbits of the major planets. But others, near-Earth asteroids, have orbits that could bring them closer to Earth or cross Earth’s orbit.

There are so many reasons to find these objects, according to NASA. Some asteroids pose a risk of collision with the Earth, while others are necessary for mankind to explore space.

Interest in this particular project is so great that in the first four days since the launch of the site, more than 1,200 volunteers participated in the search, who have already completed 56% of the project.

This is not the first time that NASA has asked the public for help in finding objects in space. It was preceded by the Catalina Outer Solar System Exploration Project, in which participants were asked to search photographs for celestial bodies beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune. The Active Asteroids program is also underway to search for active asteroids, a class of objects that are rarely found.

Such programs belong to the so-called “Civil Science”, which refers to the participation of citizens in the activities and procedures that take place in the course of scientific research. Through relevant NASA programs, more than 410 citizens have contributed to NASA scientific publications. NASA is currently running 36 such active projects targeting concerned citizens around the world, from penguin population registration and lake monitoring to air quality analysis and bird voice recording.

^{Source: APE-MEB}