Week 8: The New Hit Gameshow — “Asteroid or Some Random Junk Flying in Space”

Hello stranger. I’ve spent a lot of time brainstorming entertaining introductions. But sometimes I wonder, who am I doing this for? Am I benefitting myself or anyone else in this process? Is anyone actually reading what I’ve written? What is my goal in life? Am I even working towards that goal through typing up this blog right now? 

Besides questioning the purpose of my existence in this world while staring blankly at my bedroom ceiling, over the past week I’ve been working on manually filtering through the data outputted from my machine learning model. Last last week, I discussed some possible improvements I could make to speed up the manual filtering process — technically, I tried implementing some of them (few of them worked, few of them didn’t). But I got too impatient so I decided to sit down for a solid 10 hours to process all of the original outputs anyways. 

Alrighty, let’s play a game called “Asteroid or Some Random Junk Flying in Space,” where you try to guess whether the image I show you is of an asteroid or some random junk flying in space!!

To make this easier, let me first show you what an asteroid can look like:

That’s an asteroid named 2020 AE5 (you’d expect astronomers would be a bit more colorful with their names).

And that’s an asteroid named 2019 LQ1, just another banger name for a huge, rocky behemoth flying space.

Now, are you ready? Let’s begin! Is this following image an asteroid or some random junk flying in space?

And the answer is…drumroll please…a Russian scientific satellite designed to perform research on the structure and dynamics of radio sources, a.k.a some random junk flying in space!!

Alright, next image:

And that’s an image of…the upper stage of a Titan IIIC Rocket launched in the mid-1900s! Also often referred to as some random junk flying in space.

This games harder than you think, ay? We’ll do two more:

That one is an image of…an asteroid…just kidding. Did you really think that one was an asteroid? You silly goose. That’s obviously the Explorer 50 satellite, launched in 1973 to study the magnetosphere!

Alright, last one. 

Now that one…is hopefully an asteroid. What do I mean by hopefully? Well that’s a great question.

As you might have discovered, streaks due to asteroids, satellites, and space junk all look pretty gosh-dang similar. So how do I know if what I’ve detected is an asteroid or not? Well it’s all thanks to my favorite Github user, Bill-Gray, who developed two programs, astcheck and sat_id, which automatically check if an object is a previously confirmed asteroid or an artificial satellite, respectively. Now you might be asking (I know you’re not asking but I just love using this transition), what if both these programs output nothing, as in the object is neither a previously confirmed asteroid nor a satellite? Well this could mean three things. (1) This object is simply not in the catalogs of astcheck or sat_id, but is cataloged elsewhere (relatively unlikely cause my man Bill-Gray is just built different). (2) It’s another piece of random uncataloged junk flying in space. (3) It’s a novel freaking asteroid. 

And the last image I showed above was neither a previously confirmed asteroid nor a satellite according to astcheck and sat_id. Exciting! Now how will I know if it’s an asteroid or junk? Orbit fitting. But that’s a topic for another day. 

Anyways — again, it’s been a pleasure smashing my keyboard at you across the world wide web. I’ll catch you next week.