🇺🇸 Franklin Wang

Six objects nobody had catalogued

The Society for Science described Wang's project plainly: machine-learning analysis of public telescope data that discovered six previously unknown near-Earth asteroids. Near-Earth objects are the ones whose orbits bring them into the neighbourhood of our own, which is why they are catalogued with more care than the millions of bodies further out.

The significant word in that description is "public." The images were already available; what was missing was someone willing to sift them. Sky surveys generate far more data than the astronomers who commission them can examine by hand, and faint moving objects hide easily in that excess.

Automated searching is now the standard method for this kind of work. Surveys photograph the same patch of sky repeatedly, and software compares frames to find the points of light that move against the fixed background of stars. Training a model to do that reliably, without drowning in false positives from cosmic rays and image artefacts, is the whole difficulty.

Why an award for communication

The Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication, worth $10,000 in 2021, is not given for the result alone. It recognises a finalist's ability to explain the work — to make a technical project intelligible to people outside the field.

That distinction is worth keeping straight. Wang's asteroids are the achievement; the prize is for how he presented them. At a fair judged by interview, where finalists defend their methods repeatedly over a judging day, the two are harder to separate than they sound.

The first virtual fair

Regeneron ISEF 2021 was the first entirely online edition in the competition's history of more than seventy years. More than 1,800 finalists, from 49 US states and 64 countries, competed for over $5 million in prizes, presenting to judges by video.

The top award, $75,000, went to Michelle Hua of Troy, Michigan, for a deep-learning system that recognises human actions from silhouettes. John Benedict Estrada of Fresno took $50,000 for infrared detection of drought stress in plants, and Arya Tschand of New Jersey took the $10,000 innovation award for an irrigation model. Maya Ajmera, the Society's chief executive, said that every finalist that year had "persevered in their pursuit of science in the face of the myriad challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic."

What the discovery claim does and does not say

The source states that six previously unknown near-Earth asteroids were discovered through the analysis. It does not publish their provisional designations, the survey the data came from, the confirmation process, or whether the objects were subsequently accepted into a formal catalogue.

Those are meaningful omissions for anyone who wants to check the work, and they are recorded here as gaps rather than glossed over. What can be said with confidence is that the organisation running the competition published the claim as part of its award announcement.

What is known since

No source gathered for this page reports Wang's university, later research or current work. The published trail ends in May 2021.

That silence is normal for science-fair winners and tells a reader nothing about the person. It does mean that anyone citing a current position for him is citing something that is not in this record.