Asterank (www.asterank.com) is a thought experiment that seeks to educate and inpsire people on the viability of commercially exploiting objects in our solar system's asteroid belt. Using publicly available data and a handful of scientific papers, it is a best guess at evaluating the economic prospects of mining some 580,000 cataloged asteroids. It also provides accurate interactive visualizations of our inner solar system.
Asterank has been featured on Universe Today, The Daily Mail, the JavaScript and HTML5 Weeklies, and other sites and newsletters.
Certain areas could use some cleanup and polish. In particular, the ranking and estimate logic could be formalized and improved overall. The rendering engine can be improved to display more particles and expose a lot more of the information we have.
Copyright (C) 2012 by Ian Webster
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