NEARBY Platform: Algorithm for Automated Asteroids Detection in Astronomical Images
This addresses the risk of undiscovered asteroids on collision course with Earth for the astronomical community, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blink method approaches.
The researchers tackled the problem of detecting undiscovered Near Earth Objects by developing an original NEO detection algorithm integrated into an automated MOPS processing pipeline, which implements visual analytics techniques for rapid human data validation.
In the past two decades an increasing interest in discovering Near Earth Objects has been noted in the astronomical community. Dedicated surveys have been operated for data acquisition and processing, resulting in the present discovery of over 18.000 objects that are closer than 30 million miles of Earth. Nevertheless, recent events have shown that there still are many undiscovered asteroids that can be on collision course to Earth. This article presents an original NEO detection algorithm developed in the NEARBY research object, that has been integrated into an automated MOPS processing pipeline aimed at identifying moving space objects based on the blink method. Proposed solution can be considered an approach of Big Data processing and analysis, implementing visual analytics techniques for rapid human data validation.