Mission

The mission of orbit@home is to apply distributed computing to the study of Solar System dynamics. Distributed computing provides an unmatched amount of computational power, enabling qualitatively new research levels in terms of detail and accuracy.

Many are the open problems that we plan to study with orbit@home. At first, we will focus on Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) research, focusing into the areas below:

• NEA population modeling: use all the archival observational dataset and the known NEA population to determine what is the fully debiased NEA population;
• NEA search strategies: we are studying a search strategy that maximizes the volume covered in the space of the orbital elements of the NEAs; [abstract]
• NEA impact hazard monitoring: we are studying the applicability and advantages of using a distributed computing system to monitor the impact hazard by NEAs. [abstract]

Public outreach and education represents also a very important aspect of the system, because the public provides the main distributed computing power and participates in the science being studied.