How is the new space instrument that detects dangerous asteroids

What happened on our planet 65 million years ago and meant that the extinction of dinosaurs and other life forms on Earth could happen again at any time.

This is what space agencies, scientists and astronomers from around the world believe, Find tools to find these “killer asteroids”, Either from spaceships launching missiles or collides with these objects to keep them off their deadly course, as well as creating intelligent software that warns in advance of the impending danger of collision.

Currently, Of the 25,000 near-Earth asteroids estimated to be at least 140 meters in diameter, only about 40 percent have been found. The remaining 60 percent, about 15,000 space rocks, each with the potential to release the energy equivalent to hundreds of millions of tons of TNT if they hit Earth, remains undiscovered.

Currently, A former NASA astronaut has come up with a plan to save Earth from deadly asteroids in the future. Ed Low, Ph.D. in Applied Physics, He tries to find a way to spot dangerous asteroids early enough to divert them from Earth. It’s a noble endeavor and could work in tandem with other asteroid detection and deflecting systems, such as NASA’s DART spacecraft. Foundation B612, named after the home asteroid of the main character in the children’s book Antoine de Saint-Exupery little prince, Announced the discovery of about 104 asteroids, some of which may be fatal. B612 is a nonprofit group that Low helped found.

B612 collaborated with Joachim Moeyens, a graduate student at the University of Washington, and his PhD advisor, Mario Juric, professor of astronomy. They and colleagues at the University’s Institute for Data-Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology developed an algorithm It can examine astronomical images not only to identify points of light that could be asteroids, But also to identify points of light in photos taken on different nights which are actually the same asteroid.

content, Researchers have developed a way to detect what has already been seen but not observed. The new algorithm, created to discover asteroids in the solar system, has proven its worth. The first candidate asteroids identified by the algorithm, known as traceless heliocentric orbit recovery, or THOR, confirmed by Little Planet Center From the International Astronomical Union.

Asteroid Institute, Program B612 . Foundation THOR was run on the cloud-based astrodynamics platform, Asteroid Detection Analysis and Mapping, or ADAM, To locate and track asteroids. With these new asteroids confirmed by the Minor Planet Center and added to its registry, researchers using the Asteroid Institute’s resources can make thousands of additional new discoveries that previously remained invisible to the human eye. Asteroids are usually discovered when the same part of the sky is imaged multiple times over the course of the night. A strip of the night sky contains many points of light. The distant stars and galaxies remain in the same order. But objects much closer, within the solar system, move quickly and change positions throughout the night.

Astronomers call a series of observations of a single moving object during one night a tracker.. The tracker provides an indication of the object’s movement, telling astronomers where they might be looking for another night. They can also search for older images of the same object. Many astronomical observations that are not part of systematic asteroid searches inevitably record asteroids, but only at a single time and place, not the multiple observations needed to piece together the small paths.

The AI ​​tool does not rely on a new telescope or even new observations. Instead, he looked at old photos stored in the National Laboratory of Optical and Infrared Astronomy Research (NOIRLAB) digital archives. The researchers then let the algorithm go to work searching for 412,000 different images. The goal was to filter out potentially deadly asteroids from the more than 68 billion points of cosmic light shown in the images.

“Also, it is important to note that when we say a killer asteroid, we simply mean that they are asteroids capable of killing thousands, if not millions, if they hit Earth. This does not necessarily mean that they are on a collision course with our planet.NOIRLab images, for example, were taken primarily by the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile as part of a survey of nearly one-eighth of the night sky to map the distribution of galaxies in the universe. Additional spots of light were ignored. “It’s just random data in random images of the sky,” Lu added.

But for Moeyens and Juric, a single point of light that isn’t a star or galaxy is a starting point for their algorithm, which they called Trackless Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or THOR. The law of gravity controls the motion of the asteroid. THOR builds a test orbit corresponding to the observed point of light, assuming a certain distance and velocity. Then it calculates the location of the asteroid on the following nights and before it. If a point of light appears in the data, it could be the same asteroid. If the algorithm can correlate five or six observations within a few weeks, it is a promising candidate for discovering asteroids.

In principle, There are an infinite number of possible test orbits to examine, but this would never take too impractical to calculate. In practice, since asteroids cluster around certain orbits, the algorithm should only consider a few thousand carefully selected possibilities. However, calculating thousands of test orbits for thousands of potential asteroids is the task of smashing a huge number. But the advent of cloud computing, massive computing power, and distributed data storage over the Internet, make this possible. Google contributed time on its Google Cloud platform to this effort. “It’s one of the best apps I’ve ever seen,” said Scott Penberthy, Director of Applied Artificial Intelligence at Google.

Until now, Scientists examined about one-eighth of the data for one month, September 2013, from the NOIRLab archives. THOR has produced 1,354 potential asteroids. Several of them were already in the asteroid catalog maintained by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. Some of them were previously observed, but only for one night and the small path was not enough to confidently determine an orbit.

The Minor Planet Center has confirmed that 104 objects are new discoveries so far. NOIRLab archive contains 7 years of data, indicating that there are tens of thousands of asteroids waiting to be found. “I think it’s amazing”And the said Matthew Payne, director of the Minor Planet Center, who was not involved in developing THOR. “I think it’s very interesting and also allows us to make good use of the archival data that already exists.“.

Currently, the algorithm is set up to find only main belt asteroids, those with orbits between Mars and Jupiter, and not near-Earth asteroids, those that could collide with our planet. Recognizing near-Earth asteroids is more difficult because they are moving faster. Different observations of the same asteroid can be spaced out in time and distance, and the algorithm needs to do more numerical computations to make the connections.

THOR not only has the ability to discover new asteroids in old data, but it can also alter future observations. If the telescope can return to the same place in the sky every two nights instead of every four nights, it could benefit other research, including the search for supernovae.

TheThe ADAM platform of the Asteroid Institute is a open source computer system which runs large-scale astro-dynamic algorithms using Google Cloud, notably the scalable computing and storage capabilities of Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Kubernetes Engine.

“The work of the Asteroid Institute is critical because astronomers are pushing the boundaries of what can be detected with current telescopes and technologies,” said Jurić, who is also a principal investigator for data science at UW. Institute of Electronic Sciences . Our team is pleased to work with the Institute Asteroids to enable mapping of the solar system using Google Cloud. “

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