"Synthetic Tracking" Makes It Possible to Find Millions of Near Earth Asteroids 101
KentuckyFC writes "Astronomers think that near-Earth Asteroids the size of apartment blocks number in the millions. And yet they spot new ones at the rate of only about 30 a year because these objects are so faint and fast moving. Now astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have developed a technique called synthetic tracking for dramatically speeding up asteroid discovery. Insteads of long exposures in which near-Earth asteroids show up as faint streaks, the new technique involves taking lots of short exposures and adding them together in a special automated way. The trick is to shift each image so that the pixels that record the asteroid are superimposed on top of each other. The result is an image in which the asteroid is sharp point of light against a background of star streaks. They say synthetic tracking has the capability to spot 80 new near Earth asteroids each night using a standard 5 metre telescope. That'll be handy for spotting rocks heading our way before they get too close and for identifying targets for NASA's future asteroid missions."
STANDARD UNITS, PLEASE (Score:2, Funny)
Wha...? Asteroids the size of apartment blocks?
Can we please have this measurement in a standardized unit, like Volkswagen beetles?
Man. I thought Slashdot was going downhill back when it was mostly a CueCat fansite, but this really takes the cake.