- The standard method of asteroid detection is carried out by imaging a single patch of sky at multiple occasions over a period of time. Nowadays there is too much data for the task to be tackled by hand. Specialized computer algorithms were created in order to efficiently search through images, however they are often either not sensitive enough to pick up the objects or provide false positives.
- The Asteroid Data Hunter competition offered a US$55,000 prize pool for the development of an improved asteroid hunting algorithm. The finished software is reportedly more sensitive and less prone to picking up imperfections in the data, with an initial analysis of asteroids existing between Mars and Jupiter showing a 15 percent improvement in detection rates.
- Amateur astronomers will simply have to capture an image through their telescopes, and run it through the application, which will then inform the user whether what they are seeing is a known asteroid, or a new discovery.
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