Unistellar Citizen Science

Since 2020, the Unistellar citizen science network refined the orbits of dozen near-Earth asteroids and build the 3D shape of one near-Earth asteroid. More than 800 astrometric positions of asteroids (precise measurements of asteroids’ positions) have been published to the Minor Planet Center thanks to our network. The International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) Minor Planet Center (MPC) is the official organization in charge of collecting and publishing near-Earth asteroid observational data. The astrometric positions we measured from your data were used to refine the asteroids’ orbits — you directly contributed to Planetary Defense!

Rachel Knight talks about her experience observing asteroid 1999 AP10 (AdaCarrera) to build its shape model:

“That was my second mission and I think we did 8 different recordings. The longest one being 6 hours, but most of them over 4 hours. I know 26 other citizen astronomers helped get many different observations about this one and 7 different countries. So, we had lots of views from across many different places over the course of 2 weeks.

It’s surprising to me how much is still available to backyard astronomy. You would think that anything you could see with a cheap enough telescope that I can afford would have been discovered by now, but there’s so many things out there, that not everything can point to everything and not all weather cooperates at the same time, so it’s very cool to be able to be, frankly, in my backyard and contributing to science.”