Pointless hashing? Say NO with Gridcoin. Asteroids@home!
Hello and welcome to my series, in which I meet you with the Gridcoin and the Gridcoin whitelisted projects. This time I will meet you with astrophysics project, which helps finding and knowing better the asteroids.
As you know, or you may not, Gridcoin is the coin, that changed the pointless hashing. All the work, done and shared within this blockchain goes for science's sake. All the idle resources of your computer or your mobile device and turns it into valuable data for some very complex calculations. With this "hashing" we all take part in a unique supercomputer and make science reach new heights.
Today my topic is Asteroids and the Asteroids@home project.
The most numerous objects in our solar systems are definitely the asteroids. Hundreds of thousands are already discovered and after every single day this number is rising with a vast pace. In spite these exact numbers are already here, not much is known about these objects in particular. About the most of these objects, only the size is known, while their physical parameters (the shape, the rotation period, direction of the rotation axis,...) are known only for as few as about a hundred.
Great amount of photometric data is generated constantly ant it is coming from some big projects and surveys and of course by some so-called backyard astronomers too. The invertion of the lightcurve becomes a very source-demanding process and the future,even more data will be generated from surveys that are either already in operation or still under construction. The source of data is such, that the rotation period cannot be easily estimated and this is an energy demanding process. Oppositely to classical lightcurves where the period is easily observed by the data given, a wide interval of all possible periods has to be scanned densely when dealing with the asteroids' data. This fact enlarges to a great extent the computational time and the way to deal with this amount of data about photometry of thousands of asteroids is to use the idle time of the joined computers. The great part here is that this problem is ideal for parallelization. This means, that the period interval can be divided into some smaller pieces that are separately processed then the results are combined in a whole database.
Of course, this volunteered participation of the computers wouldn't be true without the help of BOINC software by the University of Berkeley. If you want to help science, you have to download the BOINC client, which is available for free on their website. (https://boinc.berkeley.edu/)
Let's join together and grow a scientific society from our homes, or our workstations, or wherever you want. Some further support for Gridcoin is of course always needed, so be sure you make the best choice. Say NO to pointless hashing.
Sources:
http://asteroidsathome.net/- The main website of the project, source of information.
https://www.gridcoin.us/ and https://gridcoin.science/ - official Gridcoin websites.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ - BOINC client instructions and download.
Photos from Google search engine.