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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Work Is Out of This World
By Raam Wong
Journal Staff Writer
LOS ALAMOS — Three starry-eyed teens who honed a method for spotting asteroids took top honors Tuesday at the 19th annual New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge. More than 320 students from across the state used high-performance supercomputers and worked with mentors from the state's national laboratories to analyze, model and solve real-world problems.
“We haven't discovered all the asteroids in our solar system yet,” said team member Erika DeBenedictis of Albuquerque Academy, explaining the importance of the project given that half of all asteroids remain undetected.
As a result, an asteroid could be screaming dangerously close at this very moment, even as Earthlings sit home watching “American Idol.”
Observatories across the globe are constantly scanning the sky for asteroids, as well as signs that the orbits of the known ones may have changed. But it's difficult work. Asteroids are relatively small in mass, and their orbits can easily be thrown off by the gravitational tug of another object.
“NEOs, or Near-Earth-Objects, need to be frequently monitored because a slight perturbation could send the asteroid directly toward the Earth,” says the report by the team, which also includes Chris Hong, 17, and Tony Huang, 18, both of La Cueva High School.
The team notes that one asteroid — 99942 Apophis — has a 1 in 45,000 chance of slamming into the Earth. But as its orbit changes, it's important to know if those odds are growing slimmer or not.
The budding scientists believe they can help astronomers both keep tabs on known asteroids and discover new ones.
Their method depends not on scouring the sky, but on analyzing existing astronomical photographs for unidentified objects.
The process calls for using a computer program to study two photos taken at different times of the same slice of sky. By adjusting the exposure and other factors, the program can identify objects that appear in one image but not the other — possible asteroids.
The team then used online astronomical databases to ensure what they were looking at were indeed potential asteroids and not just a dim star that showed up in only one of the images.
The group collected its images from several sources, including an Albuquerque astronomer and the European Southern Observatory.
The images typically came with only an approximate idea of their location in the sky. So the team addressed that problem, too, by using computers to draw triangles between the stars in the images and searching for similar triangles among stars listed in astronomical catalogs.
The students have also begun using a high-powered “graphical processing unit” to analyze which observations of unknown objects could be of the same asteroid, a method that the team says is original to its work.
The project was the culmination of many weekends and after-school meetings. “We worked all through the year,” Hong said. Each first-place student took home a $1,000 check.
Hundreds of middle and high school students and their teachers packed into the Church of Christ in Los Alamos on Tuesday for the awards ceremony.
Their work was presented to volunteer judges from across the field of computer science at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Monday.
The competition is sponsored by Los Alamos and Sandia National laboratories and the state of New Mexico.
Prizes were handed out in categories such as “Best Written Report” and “Crowd Favorite.” Among the northern New Mexico teams, Rachel Robey and Gabe Montoya of Los Alamos Middle School took third place with a project called “Energy Efficiency Through Smart Wall Design.” They received $250 each. Their teacher is Bob Dryja and their mentors are Bob Robey and Derrick Montoya.
Tuesday marked the second time Huang won the event. A senior, Huang is leaning toward attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall.
DeBenedictis also took first place the two previous years, in which she simulated the supersonic shock waves created by space shuttles and studied how the gravitational pull of planets can assist in reaching the far reaches of the solar system.
“There are lots of different reasons to look at the sky,” DeBenedictis said.
Winners
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