"Synthetic Tracking" Makes It Possible to Find Millions of Near Earth Asteroids

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."

Re:STANDARD UNITS, PLEASE

[oodaloop]

Really? This is what takes the cake? The dupes, slashvertisements, missing or dead links, dupes, obvious grammar and spelling mistakes, dupes, pointless articles like how to re-open tabs, and lest we all forget, the dupes. But citing an article that uses apartment blocks as a reference is what does it for you?

Re:Is it just me?

[edmudama]

Article doesn't have a good description.

My guess is you take a bunch of timelapse frames of the same sky.

Then you overlay them at offsets in different directions which would keep any moving objects in the same place.

Picture doing 36000 sequences of overlays:
360 degree variation in 0.1 degree increments at 10 different radial velocities

Most of those sequences will just show blurred gray washout, but if you happened to hit the right direction as a moving object at the right speed, your overlaid image sequence will effectively keep the moving object in the same spot of the frame, which will result in the average brightness for that pixel or pixles to be higher than the surrounding blurs.

Just a guess...

Re:STANDARD UNITS, PLEASE

[Virtucon]

Ahh but are you talking about VW Beetles from the 1950s and 60s or the fat ones from the 70s? Or perhaps you're talking about the "New Beetle?" or now the "New, New Beetle?" I just want to get some specifics here so I can make sure my bunker can withstand a 20 MegaBeetle impact.