NASA Volunteers Find 15 Active Asteroids

The VA108 Asteroid display researched by volunteers (photo: dock. NASA)

JAKARTA The Active Asteroid Program underNASA found 15 asteroids that were trailed or covered in gas and dust. All these asteroids that are still active have never been found before.

Initially, more than 8,000 volunteers observed 430 thousand images of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), part of the Victor M. Blanco Telescope. During the study, they clustered asteroids as quasi-Hilda asteroids (QHAs) and Jupiter-family comets (JFCs).

Although difficult to identify, the volunteers managed to find the asteroids in the group. The asteroids they found were referred to as FZ18, LH15, FW412, VA108, CV50, DQ118, CZ16, OE31, AU242, QZ44, UQ192, TC1, QN8, OR, and VL10.

Tiffany Shaw-Diaz, one of the volunteers who published the findings of the Active Asteroid program in the Astronomical Journal, said the project was very important. According to Tiffany, Active Asteroids are a very useful program.

"I look forward to classifying the subject every day, during the time or health conditions it is possible, and I feel very honored to be working with such prominent scientists on a regular basis," Tiffany said, quoted from NASA's official blog.

The asteroid that Tiffany and her colleagues found could help scientists study the formation and evolution of the Solar System. If you are lucky, scientists can also learn the origins of the creation of water on Earth.

In addition, these 15 active asteroids can help explore space in the future. The reason is, all asteroids found have comet-like tails that may be created from the same ice so that the surrounding gas and dust can move.