I spent about an hour today exploring NASA datasets with Claude, mostly out of curiosity, inspired by this post.

It identified what appeared to be a previously unknown asteroid pair: 2018 NC15 and 2026 LD1.

Turns out the pair had already been discovered earlier this year, but that almost made the experience more interesting.

I'm a software engineer, not an astronomer. Being able to explore an entirely different field and independently arrive at an existing discovery was pretty remarkable.

Here's the writeup: https://wilkens.io/research/nea-pair-2018-nc15-2026-ld1/