If you're interested in astronomy and looking to the sky. This next project might be for you. The
International Astronomical Search Collaboration also known as ISAC, is a program that allows
citizen scientists all around the world to analyze NASA's high quality data of near-earth objects,
things like asteroids and comets. With this data, volunteers are able to make discoveries of new
asteroids in our solar system and near earth. I'm joined by ISAC Founder Dr. Patrick Miller
and citizen scientist, Ludving Adolfo Fernandez. Thank you both for joining us. Thank you.
So Patrick this sounds like an exciting project. Could you tell us more about it? Yes, we
started this project in 2006. I think we had like five teams participating. Now we've
got over 3,000 teams from 80 countries around the world to participate. We provide images from
large telescopes at the University of Hawaii the PAN-STARRS sky survey, and also the University
of Arizona the Catalina sky survey. We take these images we process them and then send them out
to teams of citizen scientists around the world and their job is to look through these
these images and find discoveries of of asteroids and occasionally near-earth objects.
Wow this is really important work so Ludving you've been involved with this project. Can you
tell us how how you participate and what sort of skills someone would need to get involved?
Well I manage the campaign for Bolivia it's named All-Bolivian Asteroid Search Campaign.
This campaign is pretty new and we are working with IASC since 2018.
To this day, more than 1,000 students participated in the campaign. There isn't like a list of skills
to participate but the student needs to meet some requirements such as having a computer and have
an internet connection. Sometimes the school is in charge of that, but the most important
is to have the desire to learn and to make to contribute to observation of asteroids.
Wow, okay so what kind of observations and discoveries have you been able to make here?
Well the Bolivian campaign we have made more than 400 published preliminary asteroids
and seven provisional asteroids. So the Bolivian campaign, we also participated
in special campaigns that are competitive among the best 10 teams of the world.Amazing,
so Dr. Miller how does the work of citizen scientists help with your research?
The citizen scientists are are finding objects that are actually not reported
by the large sky surveys. Citizen scientists are able to look at these images and see deeper
into the images than the automated detection utilities conducted either by PAN-STARRS or
Catalina. So those are important observations because they're finding things that are
that are missed in the original interventional data. Wow that is quite incredible what an
important project, and it's very cool that citizen scientists can help with this.
So what advice do both of you have for other people that want to get involved here?
Well from ISAC's point of view if you'd like to participate
you're welcome to come to our website and we have a registration form and
the staff and I will be happy to work with you. Takes a day or two once you send in
your interests, and then we'll get you set up and participating before you know it. And it's free!
Yeah for me is that don't be afraid to apply. It's a great opportunity to make important discoveries
in asteroids so there is a great experience it's free and it's open for everyone. Amazing, great
advice! Thank you both so much for the work that you're doing and for being with us here today.