SAIC Software Detects Stealthy Asteroids
About 65 million years ago an asteroid six miles in diameter struck what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Many scientists contend that the impact, which possessed the energy of 30 million nuclear weapons and created temperatures hotter than the sun's surface, helped kill more than half of the Earth's plant and animal species.
While the need to detect such "killer asteroids" is obvious, smaller "near-Earth asteroids" (NEA) can also cause devastation. In fact, NASA set a goal to identify 90 percent of the NEAs that measure one kilometer in diameter or larger by 2008. As this deadline approaches, the search has become increasingly difficult since many of the larger and brighter asteroids have already been discovered.
A deeper volume of space
To increase the discovery rate of near-Earth asteroids, researchers need to survey a deeper volume of space, including densely cluttered star fields. As described in his STFC Award-winning paper, SAIC's Peter Gural (and colleagues) developed software that used matched filter image processing to better detect asteroids.
This software — SAIC Algorithmic Testbed for Asteroid Detection (SALTAD) — extends detection ranges to distant asteroids to better help identify asteroids in densely cluttered starfields (most asteroids orbit in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter). The University of Arizona has incorporated SALTAD into its Spacewatch project — in fact, SALTAD's matched filter approach has been shown to detect 40 percent more asteroids in Spacewatch imagery than their existing software implementation. (The goal of Spacewatch is to study the statistics of asteroids and comets to better understand the dynamical evolution of the solar system.)
Software package developed
In addition, applying matched filtering to near-Earth asteroid recovery and tracking operations is, according to the authors, an application of this technology that can be fielded with minimal processing capability. In fact, Gural and associates have developed a software package — available from SAIC with NASA approval for release — that scientists can use to detect near-Earth asteroids.
The paper, "Matched filter processing for asteroid detection," was published in the October 2005 issue of The Astronomical Journal.
STFC Award Winner
SAIC promotes cutting-edge research through its SAIC Technical Fellows Council (STFC) publication awards. Since 1984, the STFC has recognized outstanding technical and scientific papers and books written by SAIC scientists and engineers. This summary is from one of our award-winning papers.
Inside SAIC Magazine
The following articles are featured in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of SAIC Magazine.