Asteroids@home

[Rusty]

Asteroids@home

About Asteroids@home
Asteroids@home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in Asteroids@home. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.

Asteroids are the most numerous objects in the solar system. So far, hundreds of thousands of asteroids are known, with hundres of new discoveries every day. Altough the total number of known asteroids is large, very little is known about the physical properties of individual objects. For a significant part of the population, only the size of the bodies is known. Other physical parameters (the shape, the rotation period, direction of the rotation axis,...) are known only for hundreds of objects.

Because asteroids have in general irregular shapes and they rotate, the amount of sunlight they scatter towards the observer varies with time. This variation of brightness with time is called a lightcurve. The shape of a lightcurve depends on the shape of asteroid and also on the viewing and illumination geometry. If a sufficient number of lightcurves observed under various geometries is collected, a unique physical model of the asteroid can be reconstucted by the lightcurve inversion method.

The project Asteroids@home was started with the aim to significanly enlarge our knowledge of physical properties of asteroids. The BOINC application uses photometric measurements of asteroids observed by professional big all-sky surveys as well as 'backyard' astronomers. The data is processed using the lightcurve inversion method and a 3D shape model of an asteroid together with the rotation period and the direction of the spin axis are derived.

Because the photometric data from all-sky surveys are typically sparse in time, the rotation period is not directly 'visible' in the data and the huge parameter space has to be scanned to find the best solution. In such cases, the lightcurve inversion is very time-consuming and the distributed computation is the only way how to efficiently deal with photometry of hundres of thousands of asteroids. Moreover, in order to reveal biases in the method and reconstruct the real distribution of physical parameters in the asteroid population, it is necessary to process large data sets of 'synthetic' populations.

Received an email about this project. wodan has contacted Josef Durech (director of the Asteroids@home project at Charles University in Prague) and he is very keen to have the project added.

[cswchan]

Just joined... downloaded 1 Wu... will let you know in a bit.

[wodan]

Thank you Rusty for starting this thread.
Yes, it seems as very interesting project. I'll have to admit I have not run the project too long, but so far I always gotten tasks for both linux and windows. (60K task available atm, rather short tasks). The answer from Mr. Josef Durech was that he believes that the project fulfills all requirements:
(The project must:
1 be active
2 accept new members and teams immediately upon registration
3 have parsable team stats
4 have team stats that are updated regularly
* provide a client program which runs on a local PC The project must not:
* be a keylogger or mouseclick counter
* have a maximum number of teams or members)

Sorry to say, I have no idea how to confirm point 3 and 4, but the project is recorded on boincstats (down for the moment) and free-dc as far as I can understand.
PS: I have informed Josef Durech of this thread.

May thee Ninjas come to a wise (and positive ) conclusion.
Best regards wodan, (Team Norway).

[Rusty]

Wodan,

adding projects to the Vault is a community decision.

If bioncstats, free-dc have the stats then the Vault can steal them too.

Thanks for the email mate. Invite your Team Norway mates to join the conversation.

[cswchan]

Looks like an average 2 - 8 hrs per WU... granted... also running other stuff alongside BOINC. Seems to play well with other projects within BOINC.

[Beyond]

Just joined the project 10 minutes ago to check it out. Went back to the home page and voila I'm "user of the day". Must not be a lot of users yet. Nice way to start at a project though. I'll report back when I know more. One positive thing I noticed is that they're using a fixed credit system instead of the crazy credit-new. Kudos for that.

[wodan]

I asked Josef about the difference of asteroids@home and orbit@home, not to important in respect to the requirements but still. I invited him to this thread. Here is the answer:

" I don't know much about the Orbit@home project but the main difference is that Orbit@home concentrates on computing orbits of asteroids in the Solar System, Asteroids@home studies shapes and spins of asteroids with well-known orbits. In order to derive shape and spin for an asteroid from its brightness, the asteroid has to be observed many times over couple of years, so its orbit has to be known. So we do not compute any orbits or orbital evolution, we take this information form the database of minor planets.

Regards

Josef
"

[DigiK-oz]

Just joined and got some tasks immediately. First thing I always want to know : checkpoints? And yes, the app checkpoints frequently. Stats are available in the regular BOINC XML format.

[RHMash]

I saw this one a few months ago when looking for new projects but they only had a Linux app back then. I couldn't run it, but I don't remember seeing any issues back then other than people asking for a windows app and asking about the purpose of the project and comparing it to orbit@home. Testing it on a win7 and server 2008 systems, no issues so far....

[cswchan]

It's been just over 1 week since I have started running this... seems to play well, still has lots of WUs... although they ran out for a few hours a few days ago, but, came back in no time at all...

[Janus7]

Been running it for 10 days, so far no problems and WUs are <4hrs. Has someone already made a "Team Ninja" team for this project?

[Rusty]

Team Ninja created.


Congrats Janus7

[Janus7]

Thanks. That was my 1st one.

Congrats for your UotD on Leiden Classical.

[Beyond]

Seems to be working fine after the excess WU pending situation was cleaned up.

[fractal]

I started running this project almost 6 months ago. It started out pretty rough. Tons of pending work. Unresponsive admins who's only response was to dismiss the feedback.

But that changed a few months ago. The admins started doing something other than ignore the volunteers and started making changes to address the problems.

Finally they released a windows client so the majority of crunchers can crunch.

I can not really recommend this project as it would most likely fall victim to the vault syndrome, but then again I can't say much against it either.