The AsteroidZoo community has exhausted the data that are available at this time. With all the data examined we are going to pause the experiment, and before users spend more time we want to make sure that we can process your finds through the Minor Planet Center and get highly reliable results.

We understand that it’s frustrating when you’ve put in a lot of work, and there isn’t a way to confirm how well you’ve done. But please keep in mind that this was an experiment – How well do humans find asteroids that machines cannot?

Often times in science an experiment can run into dead-ends, or speed-bumps; this is just the nature of science. There is no question that the AsteroidZoo community has found several potential asteroid candidates that machines and algorithms simply missed. However, the conversion of these tantalizing candidates into valid results has encountered a speed bump.

What’s been difficult is that all the processing to make an asteroid find “real” has been based on the precision of a machine – for example the arc of an asteroid must be the correct shape to a tiny fraction of a pixel to be accepted as a good measurement. The usual process of achieving such great precision is hands-on, and might take takes several humans weeks to get right. On AsteroidZoo, given the large scale of the data, automating the process of going from clicks to precise trajectories has been the challenge.

While we are paused, there will be updates to both the analysis process, and the process of confirming results with the Minor Planet Center. Updates will be posted as they become available.

https://talk.asteroidzoo.org/
http://reporting.asteroidzoo.org/

Thank you for your time.