How Members Of The Public Helped Hubble Find Thousands Of Asteroids

BY GEORGINA TORBET/MAY 22, 2022 2:34 PM EDT

The Hubble Space Telescope collects an enormous amount of data, and it has an archive stretching back for more than 30 years. That's more data than any individual scientist could study in their lifetime, so to make the most of this incredible scientific tool, Hubble data isn't only analyzed by experts — the public is invited to help, too. In citizen science projects, members of the public are asked to help perform the kinds of tasks that are difficult for computers to do well, such as recognizing shapes. This data can then be fed to machine learning programs to make them better at recognizing the objects in question (via The Conversation).

The Hubble Space Telescope collects an enormous amount of data, and it has an archive stretching back for more than 30 years. That's more data than any individual scientist could study in their lifetime, so to make the most of this incredible scientific tool, Hubble data isn't only analyzed by experts — the public is invited to help, too. In citizen science projects, members of the public are asked to help perform the kinds of tasks that are difficult for computers to do well, such as recognizing shapes. This data can then be fed to machine learning programs to make them better at recognizing the objects in question (via The Conversation).

One such project has been using Hubble data to identify asteroids. Citizen scientists have helped to identify more than 1,700 asteroid trails in data from Hubble's archives, made up of more than 37,000 images (via Hubble).

The project, named the Hubble Asteroid Hunter, was started in June 2019, and the results were released in May 2022. It's not easy to spot asteroids as they only appear briefly in Hubble's view — for roughly 30 minutes — but they leave behind a trail that can be spotted by eagle-eyed members of the public. More than 11,400 people contributed to the project, combing through data taken between April 2002 and March 2021 by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. The public identified more than 1,000 trails, which were then used to train an AI. Between the public and the AI, a total of 1,701 trails were identified.

Read More: https://www.slashgear.com/871065/how-members-of-the-public-helped-hubble-find-thousands-of-asteroids/