RSCC – Ted Stryk, Roane State Associate Professor of Philosophy and English, had an asteroid named in his honor upon providing crucial image processing work used by the NASA New Horizons team during its Pluto exploration.

The NASA New Horizons mission was a landmark space probe that made history by becoming the first and only spacecraft to explore Pluto, its moons, and venture into the Kuiper Belt.

Stryk has a lengthy career and passion for the universe’s mysteries, and he was originally tapped in 2009 to come work with the NASA team for his image processing skillsets.

“I still remember when I first received the email asking me to come work with the mission, I actually checked the IP address to make sure it was legit before responding,” Stryk shared.

Using data from the Voyager missions of the 1970s and 80s in the outer solar system, Stryk was able to reprocess the datasets in order to improve the quality of the image data, which in some cases is the only close up imagery scientists have.

The processed images helped NASA better understand moons of Uranus and Neptune that provide analogs for understanding Pluto and its moons.

“Image processing involves using computer algorithms to manipulate images, to improve their quality, and extract information to make them more suitable for analysis,” Stryk explained. “Unlike studying the earth, where we can simply take better photos if the ones we have aren’t good enough, it would take decades to get back out to the outer solar system. So extracting every bit of information we can from the images we have is an important task.”

Stryk shared in the case of the older missions, modern computers can do things that would have been impossible at the time, which means there is a lot of important work to be done.

The asteroid named after him, (230728) Tedstryk, was originally discovered by Mark Buie in 2003. It’s potentially a large fragment of the near 200 kilometer (km) proto-planet Themis, and the celestial body is estimated to be about 2.5 kms across. It is known to have ice and possibly organic matter on its surface.

Scientists believe Themis was hit by another large body, shattering much of it and forming what is called the “Themis family” of asteroids. This asteroid research benefits scientists’ understanding of planet cores, something that can’t be accessed directly on Earth.

“For asteroids like Tedstryk that are members of asteroid families, the most interesting thing is to see what are, in effect, small fragments of small planets, which allows scientists to see parts of them which would be deep inside an intact planet,” Stryk added.

His effort was recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a global organization that, among its many responsibilities, names bodies in the solar system to produce consistent terminology to be used throughout the world.

“When I was a kid, I had two dreams. I was going to be a Major League Baseball player. I wasn’t good enough to be a little league starter, so that wasn’t happening,” Stryk joked. “And I was going to work on the Pluto mission, whenever it came. So the fact that this one actually happened still doesn’t seem real. This recognition of my work in planetary science, especially relating to this mission, is icing on the cake.”

For more information about Stryk’s work, visit his blog at planetimages.blogspot.com.