Asteroids@home

Asteroids@home is a volunteer distributed computing project that needs your help to increase our asteroid knowledge.

Why asteroids?

Since asteroids are remnants from the early solar system, studying them can provide insights into our solar system. They contain information about the building blocks of planets and can help us understand how planets like Earth formed and evolved. Asteroids are diverse and offer a wide range of scientific and possibly economic opportunities. By studying their compositions, surface properties, and geology, scientists can learn more about the history and evolution of these small celestial bodies, as well as the broader processes that have shaped our solar system. Additionally, some asteroids have the potential to impact Earth, and understanding their orbits, compositions, and sizes is crucial for developing strategies to mitigate potential threats. By studying asteroids, scientists can identify and assess these impact hazards, and develop methods to deflect or mitigate threats.

Goal

Asteroids home is establishing the physical properties of asteroids in our solar system, publishing the results in peer-reviewed journals and making them publicly available in the DAMIT database.

The "Database of Asteroid Models from Inversion Techniques" (DAMIT) provides the astronomical community access to reliable and up-to-date physical models of asteroids - i.e., their shapes, rotation periods, and spin axis directions.

There are almost a million known asteroids - we know their orbit in the solar system (by measuring their position at different times) and their approximate size (by measuring their brightness and knowing their distance). To learn more about their physical properties, other observing techniques must be used. One of them is photometry - the measure of brightness variations caused by rotation. By this technique, rotation periods were derived for tens of thousands of asteroids.

Methods

With a huge amount of photometric data coming from big all-sky surveys as well as from backyard astronomers, asteroid Light curve inversion modeling becomes viable – though it generally has been far too compute intensive for use at scale.

Light curve inversion is a mathematical technique used to model the surfaces of rotating objects from their brightness variations. However, data from the surveys which serve as input data are often sparse in time, which means that the rotation period - the basic physical parameter - cannot be estimated from the data easily. Contrary to classical light curves where the period is "visible" in the data, a wide interval of all possible periods has to be scanned densely when analyzing sparse data. This enormously enlarges the computational time, with the result that the only practical way to efficiently handle photometry of hundreds of thousands of asteroids is to use distributed computing.https://asteroidsathome.net/

The Asteroids@home applications that are distributed by Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), employ photometric measurements of asteroids from observed data. The results are mathematical asteroid models with the direction of the spin axis and the rotation period. This is important data to document for asteroids in our solar system. Our future may depend on it.

Project team / Sponsors

Asteroids@home is based at Astronomical Institute, Charles University in Prague in cooperation with Radim Vančo from CzechNationalTeam. Georgi Vidinski is the software developer. The project is directed by Josef Durech.

Scientific results

Scientific publications

# Durech, Josef, J. Hanus, R. Vanco, D. Oszkiewicz and E. Bowell. New Asteroid Shape Models Derived from the Lowell Photometric Database. (2013).

# Durech, J., B. Carry, M. Delbo, M. Kaasalainen and M. Viikinkoski. Asteroid Models from Multiple Data Sources. (2015). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.1502.04816.

# Ďurech, J., J. Hanuš and R. Vančo. Asteroids@home—A BOINC distributed computing project for asteroid shape reconstruction Astronomy and Computing (2015). DOI: 10.1016/j.ascom.2015.09.004.

# Cibulková, H., J. Ďurech, D. Vokrouhlický, M. Kaasalainen and D. A. Oszkiewicz. Distribution of spin-axes longitudes and shape elongations of main-belt asteroids. Astronomy & Astrophysics (2016). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201629192.

# Durech, J., J. Hanus, D. Oszkiewicz and R. Vanco. Asteroid models from the Lowell Photometric Database. (2016). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.1601.02909.

# Hanuš, J., J. Ďurech, D. A. Oszkiewicz et al. New and updated convex shape models of asteroids based on optical data from a large collaboration network. Astronomy & Astrophysics (2016). DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201527441.

# Durech, Josef, Josef Hanus and Victor Ali-Lagoa. Asteroid models reconstructed from the Lowell Photometric Database and WISE data. (2018). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.1807.02083. # Durech, Josef, Josef Hanus and Radim Vanco. Inversion of asteroid photometry from Gaia DR2 and the Lowell Observatory photometric database. (2019). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.1909.09395.

# Durech, J., J. Tonry, N. Erasmus, L. Denneau, A. N. Heinze, H. Flewelling and R. Vanco. Asteroid models reconstructed from ATLAS photometry. (2020). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.2010.01820.

# Ďurech, Josef, Michael Vávra, Radim Vančo and Nicolas Erasmus. Rotation Periods of Asteroids Determined With Bootstrap Convex Inversion From ATLAS Photometry. Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.3389/fspas.2022.809771.

Contributing

To participate, install the BOINC client and attach to the project using its official URL: http://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/. Your computer will perform calculations and report results back to the project servers automatically.