helloallworlds
#22. Near-Earth Objects
Here are this week's 3 links worth exploring:
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A History of Near-Earth Objects Research by Erik M. Conway, Donald K. Yeomans, and Meg Rosenburg is a free ebook published by NASA about the role that asteroids and comets have played in the evolution of life on Earth. Perceived in ancient history as messages from the gods, these celestial objects have gone from marginal interest as "space rubble" to targeted missions and threat mitigation in modern times, towards a future source of space resources to build a solar system-wide civilization: https://wikiarchives.space/picture.php?/755245/category/5225
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A pair of middle-school students put the COVID-19 lockdowns to remarkably productive use: contribute to planetary defence by identifying and tracking asteroids. Artash Nash and Arushi Nath explain how they designed an implemented a project on asteroid astrometry. They used a combination of space science, robotic telescopes, and Python programming to sift through open datasets and astrophotography images for asteroids, determine their coordinates, calculate velocity and predict trajectory, to answer the ultimate question: how close will they come to Earth: Aiming for Apophis
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Arushi Nath continued her work using open-source tools to detect unknown asteroids in images using Python, which she makes available in a Jupyter notebook: https://github.com/Spacegirl123/Finding-Unknown-Asteroids-In-Sky-Images
Quote of the Week: "We are alone in the universe, or we are not. Either way, the implication is staggering." — Uncertain, though often attributed to Arthur C. Clarke
Onward!
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