World Wide Astronomy Network

For this challenge, we invite you to become "virtual contributors" to the Asteroid Grand Challenge and develop a hypothetical method, concept note or simple prototype that demonstrates how Machine Learning could be used to help us avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs.

ASTRONOMY OUTREACH OF KOSOVO’s PROJECT
NASA SPACE APPS CHALLENGE 2016 / NEO-S

“WORLD WIDE ASTRONOMY NEWTOWORK”

I’m Pranvera Hyseni, founder and director of “Astronomy Outreach of Kosovo” program, which is the largest non-profit astronomy outreach program in Kosovo. Our mission is to spread the science, inspire the people about exploring the planetary system and educating the youth to get us off this planet and back into space.

Since it formed over 4.5 billion years ago, Earth has been hit many times by asteroids and comets whose orbits bring them into the inner solar system.
These objects, collectively known as Near Earth Objects or NEOs, still pose a danger to Earth today.
There is no doubt that sometime in the future Earth will suffer another cosmic impact; the only question is "When ?".
There is strong scientific evidence that cosmic collisions have played a major role in the past.
Scientist believe that 65 milion years ago, Earth has been crashed by a huge Asterioid in Jukatan Peninsula in Mexico. This impact made a huge explosion. Debris from the explosion was thrown into the atmosphere, severely altering the climate, and leading to the extinction species that existed at that time, including the dinosaurs.
That such cosmic collisions can still occur today was demonstrated graphically in 1994 when Comet ‘Levy’ crashed into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
Many people ask: Why do we hunt the Neart-earth objects ? Why its so much importnt to know their trajectory ?
Now, imagine if such an asteroid or comet would hit Earth ? What whould happen ?
We would have suffered global catastrophes of the kind that inspire science fiction movies.
It would have dissapear all kind of life evidence on Earth, including us.

To make sure that nothing is gonna happen like that, is to protect our planet by cosmic impact.
By the fact the NEOs are really really faint and small objects in sky, then its really hard to detect them, but we must not stop investigating them and catching them before they enter our atmosfere, otherwise it could be too late.
To increase safety about this, our group has think of a solution!
Unfertunately, there in the world doesn’t exist any website, where all observers from different side of the world (proffesional & amateurs) can join together to show what they have actually been observing and exploring, using optical equipments like Telescopes, Observatories, Radiotelescopes, Interferometers, Planetariums etc.
We have think to create a website on which we showed all these cathegories, and each observer can long in from his counry and can post all data that they have collected from their observations of NEOs, no matter if it was thru telescopes or radiotelescopes or interferometer etc.
This Website can be a "WORLD WIDE ASTRONOMY NETWORK" between all astronomers of the world. Amateur Astronomers can contribute on this site a lot, they can help different organisations, including NASA who have the equipments needed, just by giving informations to chose targets thru that website.
Its a GREAT way to accelerate the speed of detection and characterization.
This is the best way how astronomers can work together just by using a website and find out for a short time the trajectory of an asteroid and understanding if that can be hazardous asteroid.
Its the easiest way to help NASA know earlier about such an hazard.

At the end, I just want to tell everyone that exploring the sky it’s not something that only NASA should do, but its up to all of us, because we protect our Planet and our lifes.
However, keep searching the skies, exploring and discovering, because you never know what you are gonna find up there….. Isn’t that true !? :)

THANK YOU

Resources were used from NASA and other observatories.