Hubble Asteroid Hunter: I. Identifying asteroid trails in Hubble Space Telescope images
Sandor Kruk, Pablo Garc\'ia Mart\'in, Marcel Popescu, Bruno Mer\'in,, Max Mahlke, Beno\^it Carry, Ross Thomson, Samet Karadag, Javier Dur\'an,, Elena Racero, Fabrizio Giordano, Deborah Baines, Guido de Marchi, Ren\'e, Laureijs

TL;DR
This study combines citizen science and machine learning to identify and analyze asteroid trails in Hubble Space Telescope archival images, revealing many faint and potentially new asteroids beyond ground-based survey capabilities.
Contribution
It introduces a novel approach integrating citizen science and deep learning to detect faint asteroids in large astronomical archives, expanding the known population.
Findings
Detected 1701 new asteroid trails in HST data.
Identified asteroids down to magnitude 24.5, fainter than ground surveys.
Matched 39% of trails with known objects, suggesting many new asteroids.
Abstract
Large and publicly available astronomical archives open up new possibilities to search and study Solar System objects. However, advanced techniques are required to deal with the large amounts of data. These unbiased surveys can be used to constrain the size distribution of minor bodies, which represents a piece of the puzzle for the formation models of the Solar System. We aim to identify asteroids in archival images from the ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Science data archive using data mining. We developed a citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, Hubble Asteroid Hunter (www.asteroidhunter.org) asking members of the public to identify asteroid trails in archival HST images. We used the labels provided by the volunteers to train an automated deep learning model built with Google Cloud AutoML Vision to explore the entire HST archive to detect asteroids crossing the…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAstro and Planetary Science · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research · Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
