Check the prior art
They should have a look at an early paper on this topic.
"On the Dynamics of an Asteroid" by a Professor Moriarty.
NASA is crowdsourcing the hunt for asteroids in Earth's purview, and has teamed up with the proposed space mining corporation Planetary Resources to use your spare compute time to the project. Last year the Planetary Resources visited hipster festival SXSW to announce the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge, a $55,000 competition …
Who distributes documentation as a .docx file? Have they heard of PDF?
It probably is not a GPU program. The website doesn't seem to say anything on this, and I don't read .docx worth a darn.
I didn't look, but I would not be surprised if the source code is in a Zip archive, instead of a proper tarball. :-)
This is the backup plan functioning in place of exactly that. Ideally they -would- love to make something that can produce itself, because that would make it possible to mine much, much more quickly. Not to mention forgetting entirely about maintenance and further launches. Only then do we get resource shortages in the inner belt, but don't worry - the robot biome probably won't be able to cope with reentry and specimens capable of reproducing in macrogravity until something in the wild evolves intelligence, same as us pollinating space.
...crowd computing...
Anyone know what the legal governance and stated aims are of this company are if it happens to be successful and ends up incredibly rich? Will all this begging the public for resources and cash give a real return to the world or just make some very rich people even richer?
I don't doubt the science being done and the good that can do, but I'm a little concerned at not being able to find anything about any future commercial returns. Yeah, crowd funding is effectively charitable giving without a registered charity licence designed to make the giver "feel good", but the list of people running this venture could find a couple of million down the back of their respective sofas.
This reminds me of a daft scheme to dredge the deep ocean for manganese nodules. All looked good till someone pointed out that if the project succeeded the world would be awash with Manganese and it would be worthless. So, what happens to the value of diamonds if a meteor weighing a hundred tons consisting of pure diamond suddenly lands on earth.