Asteroids@home - A BOINC distributed computing project for asteroid shape reconstruction

TL;DR

Asteroids@home leverages distributed computing via BOINC to efficiently reconstruct asteroid shapes, rotational periods, and spin axes from photometric lightcurve data, enabling large-scale asteroid modeling.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel distributed computing framework specifically designed for asteroid shape reconstruction using lightcurve inversion methods.

Findings

Successfully reconstructed shapes and spin parameters of multiple asteroids.

Demonstrated scalability and efficiency of the BOINC-based distributed computing approach.

Enabled large-scale asteroid modeling through volunteer computing resources.

Abstract

We present the project Asteroids@home that uses distributed computing to solve the time-consuming inverse problem of shape reconstruction of asteroids. The project uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) framework to distribute, collect, and validate small computational units that are solved independently at individual computers of volunteers connected to the project. Shapes, rotational periods, and orientations of the spin axes of asteroids are reconstructed from their disk-integrated photometry by the lightcurve inversion method.