Screen Shot 2014-06-24 at 4.54.01 PMPlanetary Resources announced today that it has teamed up with Zooniverse to create Asteroid Zoo, a web app that allows people to search for asteroids by flipping through pictures collected by the Catalina Sky Survey.

The app gives users a variety of tools to flip through a quartet of sky images collected from a telescope, in order to find moving lights that would indicate the presence of an asteroid. Users then mark the items in the images that are either visual artifacts or asteroids, and submit their input to Asteroid Zoo. The app will tell them if they find (or miss) an asteroid that astronomers have already found, and also give users an opportunity to find asteroids that nobody else has spotted before.

planetaryresourcesWhile this may seem like a silly way to spend a few minutes staring deeply into a computer screen and watching some bright lights, the data gathered could have a significant impact – literally. There are an estimated 60 million asteroids orbiting the Sun, and humans currently only track 620,000 objects.

That means there could be more than 59 million objects out there that humanity doesn’t know about, and it’s likely that some percentage of those are on a collision course with Earth. If Asteroid Zoo users could identify a potential threat before it reaches us, that would aid humanity’s long-term survival.

Of course, finding new objects would also be a boon to Redmond-based Planetary Resources’s eventual mission of starting to mine asteroids for valuable materials. The company said last month that it hopes to build “gas stations” that would provide spacecraft with fuel along their journey, without requiring them to fly all of it out of the Earth’s atmosphere.

The new data that Planetary Resources collects will also be put towards testing asteroid detection software. The company is working with NASA to offer cash bounties for people who can successfully create software that can pick asteroids out from a data set that uses images from the same sky survey that powers Asteroid Zoo.

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