A Novel Approach to Asteroid Identification Using Image Processing of Existing Data

This project looks at ways to automatically identify asteroids in individual, existing images of the sky. These sightings may be used to refine the orbits of known asteroids as well as discovering new asteroids. In this project, a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) was used to calculate orbits- running 40 times faster than the CPU. This could lead to the discovery of new asteroids without the use of a telescope.

Project Team
Name: Hoachen “Chris” Hong
Stats: 16 year-old Junior from La Cueva High School in Albuquerque , NM
Influential Person: Tony Huang
Career Goal: Attend and graduate from a 4 yr university
Field Interest: I have always been interested in physics and computer science. Tony and Erika took me observing and I had a blast.

Name: Duanni “Tony” Huang
Stats: 18 year-old senior from La Cueva High School in Albuquerque, NM
Influential Person: Erika DeBenedictis
Career Goal: I would like to major in electrical engineering or physics at MIT.
Field Interest: I attended a summer science camp where I learned to manually find asteroids in images. Our current project greatly expands on this by making this process automatic and applicable to huge amounts of data.

Name: Erika Alden DeBenedictis
Stats: 17 year-old Junior from La Cueva High School in Albuquerque, NM
Influential Person: Chris Hong
Career Goal: I would like to major in aerospace or physics at Caltech.
Field Interest: I attended a summer science camp where I learned to manually find asteroids in images. Our current project greatly expands on this by making this process automatic and applicable to huge amounts of data.

Tags: education, innovation, inspire, Intel, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, Intel ISEF

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