High school student decodes NASA data, maps 1.5 million unidentified space objects

Using NASA data, a high school student identified 1.5 million unknown objects, and won $250,000.

A summer project for a teenager while working on archival data from NASA has discovered 1.5 million previously unidentified objects. This chilling revelation came last year only when Matteo Paz, who is from California, is also a student at Pasadena High School. He joined Planet Finder Academy in the summer of 2022. The program immerses students in real world astronomy challenges.

He won over $250,000 for the discovery of 1.5 million unidentified objects.

The discovery was made by Matteo Paz, a high school student from California, while analysing archival data from NASA during the summer of 2022. Paz was part of the Planet Finder Academy, a programme that introduces students to real-world problems in astronomy and data science.

Under the guidance of Davy Kirkpatrick, a scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Centre (IPAC), Paz worked with data collected by NASA’s NEOWISE mission.

Launched in 2009, NEOWISE was designed to track near-Earth asteroids. Over a decade, it scanned the entire sky in infrared light, creating an archive of nearly 200 billion individual measurements.

The dataset included signals from stars, galaxies, and distant cosmic events, many of which had never been examined in detail.