NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge has released a new software application that will enable members of the public to find asteroids.

The app is collaboration between NASA and space mining corporation Planetary Resources. It runs on PCs and Macs to study photos from space and spot space rocks.

Planetary Resources firm visited Austin's SXSW festival and announced an Asteroid Data Hunter challenge of $55,000 in December 2014. The goal of the challenge was to design algorithms to search for asteroids in images obtained by Earth-bound telescopes.

NASA then tested the entries on its stockpile of images of our solar system's Kuiper belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.

The best winning algorithm selected has now been implemented in a free piece of software that runs on volunteers' PCs and Macs to study photos from space and spot space rocks.

The selected algorithm improved detection sensitivity, reduced false positives, and supported all computer platforms. It also increased new asteroid identification by 15%.

With this app, the amateur astronomers can now analyze images from their own telescopes and determine whether a matching asteroid already is known.

The users can report new findings via the app to the Minor Planet Center of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics that confirms and archives the new asteroids.

Jose Luis Galache of the Minor Planet Center said, "The beauty of such archives is that the data doesn't grow stale, and with novel approaches, techniques and algorithms, they can be harvested for new information".

He added that the participants of the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge probed observations of the night sky for new asteroids that might have slipped through the software cracks.

The new asteroid hunting app can be downloaded from topcoder website and supports Mac and PC with a Linux client coming soon.