A research team including Kohei Kitazato, an associate professor at the University of Aizu in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima Prefecture, is developing an application that allows people to spot asteroids that could hit the Earth using their own personal computers.
The project will use astronomical images captured by the Subaru Telescope at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s facility in Hawaii.
With public interest in space growing, after news such as the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 space probe bringing back samples of sand from asteroid Ryugu, the team hopes to seek people’s cooperation in finding new asteroids from vast amounts of data of more than 700,000 images.