Asteroids@home - A BOINC distributed computing project for asteroid shape reconstruction

Abstract

We present the project Asteroids@home that uses distributed computing to solve the time-consuming inverse problem of shape reconstruction of asteroids. The project uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) framework to distribute, collect, and validate small computational units that are solved independently at individual computers of volunteers connected to the project. Shapes, rotational periods, and orientations of the spin axes of asteroids are reconstructed from their disk-integrated photometry by the lightcurve inversion method.

References in corpus (2)

• Combining asteroid models derived by lightcurve inversion with asteroidal occultation silhouettes
• Asteroids' physical models from combined dense and sparse photometry and scaling of the YORP effect by the observed obliquity distribution

Cited by in corpus (7)

• PHOTOMETRYPIPELINE: An Automated Pipeline for Calibrated Photometry
• New and updated convex shape models of asteroids based on optical data from a large collaboration network
• Asteroid models from the Lowell Photometric Database
• Spin states of asteroids in the Eos collisional family
• Asteroid models reconstructed from the Lowell Photometric Database and WISE data
• Distribution of spin-axes longitudes and shape elongations of main-belt asteroids
• Inversion of asteroid photometry from Gaia DR2 and the Lowell Observatory photometric database