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This research project was made possible through a grant from NASA.

 
 

Asteroid Hunting

 

Research Objectives

This is a three-year grant from NASA to detect asteroids in archival images. These images were taken by the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) survey. NEAT was a pioneering scientific effort that operated from 1995 to 2007. The survey discovered more than 40,000 minor planets and hundreds of comets. 
 
Nugent, Bauer, and a team of students will re-analyze the archived NEAT images. With the aid of modern software techniques, such as machine learning, they will identify near-Earth asteroids and comets in the data. 

 

 
 

Impact

Nugent and Bauer estimate that this work will double the number of asteroids detected in the NEAT data.