Since asteroid impacts are potentially preventable with the right technology, early detection is essential.
Dr. Nugent and her team are utilizing MGHPCC’s computational resources to reprocess 1 terabyte of sky images from the early 2000s, captured by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) survey. This effort is uncovering fainter observations and approximately doubling the number of recorded asteroid sightings from this dataset. Additionally, they are developing free software to help small observatories and student groups detect asteroids and comets in their own sky images.
