Great idea for a distributed project

[Wiruz]

At the moment i'm crunching SETI, because i *personally* think it is the most serious and interresting.

But one thing i would like to see is:

"Meteor watch"

We have probably all heard about the "threat" from space, and seen Armageddon, but what are the scientists actually doing? - they are trying to catalogue all the "near misses" - but why not catalouge everything... it would take some awesome processing power... but isn't that what we are here for?

It would be nice if they could foretell an impact, say... 2000 years before?

[bkehoe]

First of all, its not Meteor watch. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif Meteors are tiny particles of dust, usually from comets that product meteor showers such as Leonids. They're also referred to as shooting stars. What you mean is an Asteroid watch.

Impossible. Astronomers are trying to find new asteroids all the time, but processing power is not the key to it. They keys are telescopes. More telescopes are needed, and not the junk you buy in a camera store. I'm talking about ones which cost millions each. There are proposed projects, but most optimistic gueses for an initial 'map' of the sky are for about 10 years. Remember that scopes would be needed to search in the southern hemisphere too.

And pretending we have our scopes, and they're taking hundreds of CCD images each night, distributed computing is no good, as the amount of processing per telescope isn't much at all. An Athlon 1GHz could easily control a telescope, and then simply blink 2 images taken a few hours apart to check for movement. One of the dedicated observatories easily processes the images taken during the night and checks for movement. If movement is detected a single command is sent to the telescope and it takes another picture of the area. If it once again detects a moving object, a human is informed who then investigates further and may request that another telescope image the object. The software also instantly checks the catalogs of known objects before it issues a warning. If its new, months of observing will be completed in order to determine the orbit.

In Deep Impact the astronomer knew it would hit Earth in a few mins after observing. This is rubbish. Only after lots of observing will an orbital path be created.

Also, predicting anything that far ahead is impossible. Anything the object passes close by, e.g. planet, unknown comet (now), e.t.c. will change its orbit slightly.

Brendan

[Wiruz]

Sorry..... i just thought i would sound cool.... i didn't know that the key wasn't processing power - but what if u need to calculate their paths many years ahead, including the gravity pull from planets... that ought to take some calculations...

[bkehoe]

Maybe, but what if a currently uniscovered comet, or asteroid passes nearby our object in the future, changing its orbit. The chances of that are slim, but it is a possibility..

Brendan