Active Asteroids

Active Asteroids Citizen Science, a NASA Partner

Active Asteroids, a NASA Partner, is a Citizen Science project designed to find new asteroids with comet tails. Launched in August 2021, Active Asteroids has over 6,000 volunteers. The project has yielded six publications so far, with several more in the works!

SAFARI: Searching Asteroids for Activity Revealing Indicators

In our first paper (found here) we demonstrated that Dark Energy Camera images work well for identifying activity in images of known minor planets. We described our process for extracting these images in what would later become known as the Hunting for Activity in Repositories with Vetting-Enhanced SearchTechniques (HARVEST) pipeline. In the SAFARI paper we…
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Results

Publications

Peer-Reviewed

Publication 1: SAFARI

Chandler, Colin Orion, Anthony M. Curtis, Michael Mommert, Scott S. Sheppard, and Chadwick A. Trujillo. “SAFARI: Searching asteroids for activity revealing indicators.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 130, no. 993 (2018): 114502.

Publication 2: (6478) Gault

Chandler, Colin Orion, Jay Kueny, Annika Gustafsson, Chadwick A. Trujillo, Tyler D. Robinson, and David E. Trilling. “Six Years of Sustained Activity in (6478) Gault.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 877, no. 1 (2019): L12.

Publication 3: 2014 OG392

Chandler, Colin Orion, Jay K. Kueny, Chadwick A. Trujillo, David E. Trilling, and William J. Oldroyd. “Cometary Activity Discovered on a Distant Centaur: A Nonaqueous Sublimation Mechanism.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 892, no. 2 (2020): L38.

Publication 4: 2005 QN173

Chandler, Colin Orion, Chadwick A. Trujillo, and Henry H. Hsieh. “Recurrent Activity from Active Asteroid (248370) 2005 QN173: A Main-belt Comet.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 922.1 (2021): L8.

Publication 5: 282P

Chandler, Colin Orion, William J. Oldroyd, and Chadwick A. Trujillo. “Migratory Outbursting Quasi-Hilda Object 282P/(323137) 2003 BM80.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 937.1 (2022): L2.

Publication 6: Chasing Tails Dissertation

Chandler, Colin Orion (2022). “Chasing tails: Active Asteroid, Centaur, and Quasi-Hilda Discovery with Astroinformatics and Citizen Science.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global; Publicly Available Content Database. (2718159530).