I mentioned the name-that-asteroid contest. (And I mentioned HSC…) But why just (re)name some existing celestial body when you can (co)discover one?
COIAS is short for Come On! Impacting ASteroids. The COIAS program, new this May, is an opportunity for enthusiastic, contributing citizens to find asteroids by combing through data from HSC (Hyper Suprime-Cam), the ultra-wide-field instrument on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. The HSC was begun as a follow-on to the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey), and competitor/close follow-on to the DES (Dark Energy Survey). All these astronomy programs work by imaging distant galaxies, and using their properties to deduce the intervening cosmic medium. That intervening cosmos includes dark matter and dark energy. Since we can’t see these (hence “dark”), we must measure them by their effects on normal matter. All three (plus Rubin) are doing (will do) this job of deducing just what, exactly, is this dark matter/energy? Therefore all three have wide, sensitive cameras (…for their era; SDSS is looking a bit weak nowadays).
Since these sky surveys use wide, sensitive cameras, they will by chance pick up asteroids that happen to enter the field of view. And that’s the COIAS angle. Computers can do a fair job spotting moving objects in an image. But as that moving object converges to one pixel, and is moving at slower and slower speeds, the algorithms look a bit weak nowadays. COIAS is a platform for amateurs to receive images from the Subaru-HSC instrument’s raw data. The obvious asteroids will have been spotted; others will be borderline or undetected pixels. Users will then designate the asteroids that are left, verified when the same pixel(s) form a ‘trail’ or ‘tracklet’ in 3 images from 3 consecutive exposures. The properties of that pixel/tracklet then give us our first indication of that celestial body. If it’s an existing, catalogued object, the world has received a benefit by more tracking, with a highly sensitive telescope (Subaru is 8.2 meters in aperture). If the object is not in the catalogs, congratulations, you (and however many other COIAS members designated it) just discovered an asteroid!
web-coias.u-aizu.ac.jp/details/procedure
See also: Galaxy Zoo, Hubble Asteroid Hunter
The name “COIAS” comes from the abbreviated title for “Asteroid in Love,” or in Japanese, Koisuru Asteroido (koiastv.com). Koi As is a not quite a “magical girl” comic strip (manga) and later, anime, complete with sailor outfits. I have to say, though, it’s a story of schoolkids in Japan, so the sailor outfits are completely normal and expected. The kids in the show are in the science club, and what more fitting media tie-in?
From the comfort of your own home, you too can discover (jointly) an asteroid. Come on, science citizens!