Building My Remote Observatory at 15: Engineering for Millimagnitude Photometric Precision
My feature article on designing, funding, building, and commissioning the R60 remote observatory appears in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, 120(4), pages 135 to 141.
Presenting AT-LAST, My Asteroid Rotation Pipeline, at the Rubin Community Workshop 2026
At the Rubin Community Workshop 2026, I gave a talk in the Solar System Science session on AT-LAST (Asteroid Time-domain Lightcurve Analysis for Spin Tracking), my automated pipeline for turning the Rubin Observatory's sparse survey photometry into rel...
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Tracking Artemis II Through Open Science: Presenting Project MOON and Winning Third Place at NASA’s Exploration Science Forum 2026
My talk on tracking Artemis II with a planet-wide network of open sensors won third place in the student oral competition at NASA's Exploration Science Forum, where I was the only high-school student in a field of graduate and early-career researchers ...
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Presenting Project MOON at NASA Ames — and Meeting Artemis II Pilot Victor Glover
On 22 July 2026 I presented Project MOON at the 2026 NASA Exploration Science Forum (NESF) at NASA Ames Research Center, and the same week to the Canadian Space Agency. Project MOON tracked NASA's Artemis II mission from the launch pad to splashdown us...
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Millimagnitude Photometry in Practice: A Year of Exoplanet Transit Timing for ESA Ariel
In 2025 I set up a remote telescope observatory, IAU Minor Planet Code R60, to reach millimagnitude photometry; the engineering story is in Building My Remote Observatory. This post reports the exoplanet science from its first year: 29 transit timings ...
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Rotational Phase of Asteroid (98943) Torifune During Hayabusa2’s 2026 Flyby
The Encounter On July 5, 2026, at approximately 09:30 UTC (18:30 JST), JAXA’s Hayabusa2 Extended Mission will perform a high-speed close approach of the near-Earth asteroid (98943) Torifune. The spacecraft is planned to pass within 1 km of the asteroi...
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Building My Remote Observatory at 15: Engineering for Millimagnitude Photometric Precision
Why I built a research-grade remote observatory in southern Spain at fifteen — the engineering decisions, the fundraising and Masason Foundation grant, the loose screw 7,000 km away, and what the IAU MPC code R60 now lets me contribute to planetary defense.
My Second Year at Kyiv's Young Scientists' Conference on Astronomy and Space Physics 2026: Presenting the Shape and Spin of Asteroid 2025 FA22
INTERNATIONAL TALK My Second Year at Kyiv's Young Scientists' Conference on Astronomy and Space Physics 2026: Presenting the Shape and Spin of Asteroid 2025 FA22 Arushi Nath · 28 April 2026 On April 24, 2026, I gave a 12-minute oral presentation...
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MonitorMyMoon.com: Tracking Artemis II from Launch Pad to Splashdown Using Open Science — From Toronto
On April 1, NASA launched four astronauts toward the Moon aboard Artemis II, including Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the first Canadian to leave low Earth orbit. I have been using open science and open data to track the spacecraft every night since...
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Lightcurve and Rotation Period of Asteroid 2025 FA22
My paper on asteroid 2025 FA22 has been published in the Minor Planet Bulletin, Volume 53, Number 2 (2026). This is my second publication in the Bulletin, and it encourages me to continue doing high-quality observational and computational astronomy wo...
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How I Characterised a Newly Discovered Potentially Hazardous Asteroid and Presented the Findings at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC)
On March 17, 2026, I presented my research at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2026), held in The Woodlands, Texas. The Conference brought together thousands of researchers from space agencies, universities, and observatories to sh...
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(Co-authored Publication) ExoClock Project. IV. A Homogeneous Catalog of 620 Updated Exoplanet Ephemerides
"ExoClock Project IV: A Homogeneous Catalog of 620 Updated Exoplanet Ephemerides" (Kokori et al. 2026, ApJS, 283, 5) has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. I am a co-author, having contributed 30 transit photometry observa...
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Three Years Ago I Asked a Question at the Planetary Defense Conference - The Answer Just Arrived
Three years ago, on Day 1 of the 2023 Planetary Defense Conference being held at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, I stood up to ask a question to the NASA DART team on an issue that interested me. This month, scientists published the ...
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Precision Astrometry of the Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS
The comet 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) was discovered on 1 July 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile. Early astrometric measurements revealed that the object was moving on an unusual hyperbolic orbit, far too fast to be gravitationally bound to the Sun....
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Didymos Observations to Assess the Impact of NASA's DART Asteroid Deflection Mission
Didymos Observations to Assess Impact of DART Asteroid Deflection Mission Arushi Nath. 25 September 2022 (updated). 28 August 2022 Didymos Orbit Path: Here is the actual path being traced by asteroid Didymos across the night sky based on 20 obs...
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Revisiting a Decade Later: Asteroid (2977) Chivilikhin
The Minor Planet Bulletin (MPB) call list is a key resource for astronomers to identify asteroids that are due for observational campaigns. When (2977) Chivilikhin appeared on the list for its 2025 apparition, I decided to measure its lightcurve again,...
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Extending Exoplanet Ephemerides: Presenting at the 5th ExoClock Annual Meeting in Madrid
On 4 October 2025, I presented my research on transit timing variations (TTV) in multi-planet systems during the 5th ExoClock Annual Meeting, held at the Polytechnic University of Madrid from 3–4 October 2025. The two-day event gathered over 100 scient...
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NEPTUNE: Finding Unseen Exoplanets from Transit-Timing Variations
My open-source NEPTUNE (N-body Exoplanet Prediction Using TTV for Unseen Exoplanets) pipeline is an attempt to detect and characterise unseen exoplanets, by analysing their gravitational perturbations in the transit timings of the exoplanets we can obs...
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N-body Exoplanet Prediction Using TTV for Unseen Exoplanets (NEPTUNE): Wins Third Grand Award at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF 2025), USA
Arushi Nath The 75th Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) was held from May 10th to 17th, 2025, in Columbus, Ohio, is the world’s largest annual STEM competition for pre-college students. This year it brought together nearly 1...
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PhAst: Accelerated Asteroid Characterisation Combining Sparse Data from Sky Surveys
Asteroid Discovery is Outpacing Analysis There are around 1.3 million known asteroids, and hundreds of new near-Earth asteroids are found every month as detection surveys improve. But finding an asteroid is only the first step. To judge whether one i...
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Selected as a Masason Foundation Scholar
One of 25 young people worldwide selected in 2024 by Japan's Masason Foundation, founded by SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, for funding and mentorship in planetary-defence research.
Winning Second Prize for Canada at the 2023 European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS)
The 34th edition of the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) took place in Brussels, Belgium, from 12 to 17 September 2023. EUCYS is the most important annual student science fair in the EU, showcasing the best student scientific achieve...
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My Citizen Science Research for the NASA DART Mission and Learnings from the 2023 Planetary Defense Conference, UNOOSA, Vienna
Arushi Nath. The 8th Planetary Defense Conference was held at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) in Vienna, Austria, from 3 - 7 April 2023. The Conference, organised by the International Academy of Astronautics, is held once...
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Strengthening Planetary Defense: Developing Algorithms to Determine Asteroid’s Physical Properties and Success of Deflection Missions
September Update: The 34th European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) was held in Brussels, Belgium from 11-17 September 2023. It brought together 136 promising young scientists aged 14 to 20, from 36 countries across the EU and beyond for a f... (Link)
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My Planetary Defense Project Wins Best of the Fair Award at the 2023 Canada Wide Science Fair
Arushi Nath, Grade 8 Student, Toronto The 2023 Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF) took place in Edmonton, Alberta, from May 14 to 19, 2023. It was the first in-person event since 2019 because of the pandemic. The 61st edition of the national science fair...
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Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF) 2022 Best Project Award
Arushi Nath. Grade 7. Toronto. This year the 60th annual Canada Wide Science Fair (CWSF) was hosted virtually in Fredericton, New Brunswick, from May 13 -19, 2022. Over 350 finalists from all parts of Canada participated in the prestigious national-le...
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Strengthening Planetary Defense: Detecting Unknown Asteroids using Open Data, Math, and Python
Asteroid collision risks are real and unpredictable. 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid impact wiped away the dinosaurs. My project strengthens planetary defence by using robotic telescopes, open data, math, and python to find unknown asteroi... (Link)
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