The public will now be able to help scientists in their quest to find dangerous near-Earth asteroids, and they'll be able to do it right from their living rooms.
An asteroid mining company called Planetary Resources has paired up with Zooniverse to create a near Earth asteroid (NEA) searching program that anyone can participate in, according to a press release.
The ARKYD is the world's first donation-funded telescope. The campaign has reached $1.2 million in donations, if they reach $1.7 within the next three days the asteroid zoo will be launched. Scientists will ask civilians to track potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) from their personal computers. The program will use data from the project to improve the computer software used to find them.
"Planetary Resources values the power of the connected mind; when working together, we can accomplish much more than any of us can do alone," said Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer, Planetary Resources, Inc. "We're creating this program to harness the public's interest in space and asteroid detection, while providing a very real benefit to our planet."
Zooniverse has been employing civilian volunteers for some time now.
"Zooniverse volunteers have already inspected more than a million galaxies, discovered planets and kept an eye on solar storms," said Chris Lintott, astronomer at the University of Oxford and Zooniverse Principal Investigator. "We're looking forward to working with Planetary Resources to make sure citizen scientists everywhere can make a real contribution to spotting asteroids, too."
There are currently 620,000 objects (one percent of the asteroids in our solar system) that scientists are keeping an eye on in order to prevent an impact like the one 66 million years. The project, modeled after Zooniverse's Galaxy Zoo, will give the public a chance to look through terabytes of data collected by Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) from their personal computers.
"We're excited to open our archive of more than three-million images to citizen scientists around the world, and look forward to seeing what surprises are hiding in the data set. The results of this effort will provide invaluable feedback that we can use to make CSS a better survey," said Eric Christensen, Principal Investigator for the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey.
NASA has recently made asteroid hunting and protection a priority. They have created a new challenge of "finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them."
