NASA, the United State of America’s apex space agency, is inviting coders to develop new artificial intelligence/ machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms to help NASA astronomers identify comets under the “NASA SOHO Comet Search with Artificial Intelligence” challenge.
The challenge will officially open on January 17, Monday and will accept submissions for the next four weeks. The challenge will include a marathon match or data science challenge for solutions that are capable of detecting very faint comets and tracking their movements in sequences of telescope images.
The Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is a collaborative mission between ESA and NASA to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind. SOHO’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph, or LASCO uses two coronagraph telescopes to observe the solar corona from 1.1 to 32 solar radii; the telescopes are designed to block direct blinding sunlight and observe the much fainter solar corona and solar outflows. The data from these observations are archived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). “As an unintended consequence of the instrument’s sensitivity, LASCO also detects large numbers of previously unknown sungrazing comets.
Thus, any algorithms that can provide enhancements to the data, including reduction of noise and/or tracking of features in motion, are highly desirable and could potentially extend beyond just comet discovery and tracking, and may apply to coronagraph imagery on other heliophysics observatories.” explains the official website.
The challenge has multiple prizes, with the top prize being $ 9,000, including official comet discovery credit for competitors whose algorithms identify previously unobserved comets. “In this challenge, your task will be to create Python code that detects comets and tracks their movements in sequences of telescope images. The presence and location of comets your algorithm returns will be compared to ground truth data, the quality of your solution will be judged by how much your solution matches the expected results,” specifies the official website announcement.
This initiative is being conducted under the Open Source Science Initiative (OSSI) program which encourages activities that bolster and enable science to be more open and inclusive – including policy adjustments, supporting open-source software, and enabling cyberinfrastructure.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
