Scientists have developed a new tool to save the world from asteroids that could wreck the planet.
Heretofore, asteroids have been reported with the use of telescopes, but now scientists are using an algorithm on computers to find asteroids among billions of dots of light around the universe whose trajectory threatens earth, possibly permitting the human race to deflect them years before their path intersects with ours.
“This is the modern way of doing astronomy,” Ed Lu of the B612 Foundation stated.
“Researchers financed by B612 applied cutting-edge computational might to years-old images — 412,000 of them in the digital archives at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab — to sift asteroids out of the 68 billion dots of cosmic light captured in the images,” The New York Times reported.
The algorithm is called “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery” (THOR). It is run on a cloud-based astrodynamics platform named “Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping” (ADAM).
“Discovering and tracking asteroids is crucial to understanding our solar system, enabling development of space and protecting our planet from asteroid impacts,” Lu asserted.
“With THOR running on ADAM, any telescope with an archive can now become an asteroid search telescope,” he continued. “We are using the power of massive computation to enable not only more discoveries from existing telescopes, but also to find and track asteroids in historical images of the sky that had gone previously unnoticed because they were never intended for asteroid searches.”
Up to 60% of asteroids near Earth measuring at least 460 feet in diameter remain unseen. Possible damage from an asteroid hitting earth could equal over 1,000 megatons of TNT, the equivalent of tens to hundreds of nuclear weapons.
But now the B612 Foundation, working with University of Washington graduate student Joachim Moeyens and astronomy professor Mario Juric, as well as colleagues at the university’s Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology, created an algorithm permitting them to identify lights in space as possible asteroids and determine which ones seen on different nights are the same asteroid, thus allowing them to be tracked.
“Tracklets” consist of the observation of moving objects through one night. The algorithm the scientists created “constructs a test orbit that corresponds to the observed point of light, assuming a certain distance and velocity. It then calculates where the asteroid would be on subsequent and previous nights. If a point of light shows up there in the data, that could be the same asteroid,” the Times explained.
“It’s one of the coolest applications I’ve seen,” Scott Penberthy, director of applied artificial intelligence at Google, enthused.
“I think it’s awesome,” said Matthew Payne, director of the Minor Planet Center, echoed. “I think it’s hugely interesting and it also allows us to make good use of the archival data that already exists.”