Asteroids@home: Difference between revisions
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With a huge amount of photometric data coming from big all-sky surveys as well as from backyard astronomers, asteroid '''''[[wikipedia:Light_curve|Light curve inversion]]''''' modeling becomes viable. Light curve inversion is a mathematical technique used to model the surfaces of rotating objects from their brightness variations. However, data from surveys 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 fact enormously enlarges the computational time and the only practical way to efficiently handle photometry of hundreds of thousands of asteroids is to use distributed computing. Moreover, the problem is ideal for parallelization - the period interval can be divided into smaller parts that are searched separately and then the results are joined together.[https://asteroidsathome.net/] | With a huge amount of photometric data coming from big all-sky surveys as well as from backyard astronomers, asteroid '''''[[wikipedia:Light_curve|Light curve inversion]]''''' modeling becomes viable. Light curve inversion is a mathematical technique used to model the surfaces of rotating objects from their brightness variations. However, data from surveys 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 fact enormously enlarges the computational time and the only practical way to efficiently handle photometry of hundreds of thousands of asteroids is to use distributed computing. Moreover, the problem is ideal for parallelization - the period interval can be divided into smaller parts that are searched separately and then the results are joined together.[https://asteroidsathome.net/] | ||
The Asteroids@home applications that are distributed by '''''[[wikipedia:Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing|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 | The Asteroids@home applications that are distributed by '''''[[wikipedia:Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing|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. | ||
== Project Team / Sponsors == | == Project Team / Sponsors == | ||