Ed Lu wants to save Earth.
If there is a big space rock streaking our way, Dr. Lu would like to find it before it hits us.
B612 Foundation, a nonprofit group that Dr. Lu helped found, announced the discovery of more than 100 asteroids. B612 is the home asteroid of the foundation.
That is unremarkable. Skywatchers around the world report new asteroids. People with telescopes and robotic surveys are included.
B612 did not build a new telescope or make new observations with existing telescopes. The National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab, applied cutting-edge computational might to years-old images to sift out asteroids.
Dr. Lu said that this is the modern way of doing astronomy.
NASA and other organizations around the world are involved in the planetary defense.
About 40 percent of the asteroids that are at least 450 feet in diameter have been found. The other 60 percent of space rocks have the potential of unleashing the energy equivalent to hundreds of million of tons of TNT in a collision with Earth.
B612 collaborated with Mario Juric, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. The Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology at the university has developed a method that can identify points of light that might be asteroids and figure out which dots of light in images taken on different nights.
The researchers were able to discover what had already been seen but not noticed.
asteroids are usually discovered when the same part of the sky is photographed multiple times. There are a lot of points of light in the night sky. The stars and galaxies are the same. The objects that are close to the sun move quickly and their positions change over the course of the night.
A tracklet is a series of observations of a single moving object during a single night. Older images can be searched for the same object.
Many observations that are not part of a systematic asteroid search record asteroids, but only at a single time and place, not the multiple observations needed to put together tracklets.
The NOIRLab images were mostly taken by the Victor M. Blanco 4-Meter Telescope in Chile, as part of a survey of almost one-eighth of the night sky to map the distribution of galaxies in the universe.
The extra light was ignored because they were not what the astronomer was looking for.
A single point of light that is not a star or a galaxy is the starting point for Mr. and Dr. Juric's algorithm.
The law of gravity dictates the motion of an asteroid. THOR constructs a test orbit that corresponds to the observed point of light. It calculates where the asteroid would be on subsequent nights. If there is a point of light in the data, that could be the same asteroid. It's a good idea to link together five or six observations in a few weeks if you want to find an asteroid.
An impractical eternity would be required to calculate the infinite number of possible test orbits to examine. A few thousand carefully chosen possibilities is what the algorithm needs to consider in practice.
It's a huge task to calculate thousands of test orbits for thousands of potential asteroids. The advent of cloud computing makes it possible. The effort was made possible by the time that was given to it by the company.
Scott Penberthy is the director of applied artificial intelligence at Google.
The scientists have been sifting through the data from the NOIRLab archives. 1,354 possible asteroids were churned out by THOR. Many of them were already in the Minor Planet Center's catalog. The tracklet was not enough to confidently determine an orbit, but some of them had been previously observed.
104 objects have been confirmed as new discoveries by the Minor Planet Center. There are tens of thousands of asteroids waiting to be found according to the NOIRLab archive.
Matthew Payne, the director of the Minor Planet Center, was not involved with the development of THOR.
The only asteroids that could collide with our planet are the ones that are in the main belt. Near-Earth asteroids are more difficult to identify. Different observations of the same asteroid can be separated in different ways.
It will definitely work, Mr. Moeyens said. I haven't had a chance to try it.
THOR has the ability to discover new asteroids in old data, and it could transform future observations as well. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, formerly known as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, is currently under construction.
The Rubin Observatory is an 8.4-meter telescope that will be used to track the night sky over time.
The observatory's mission is to study the large-scale structure of the universe and spot distant exploding stars. There are a lot of smaller-than-a-planet bodies around the solar system.
Several years ago, some scientists suggested that the Rubin telescope could be adjusted so that it could find more asteroids more quickly. The change would have slowed the research.
The Rubin data would allow the telescope to cover twice as much area if the THOR algorithm works well.
Zeljko Ivezic, the telescope's director and an author on a scientific paper that described THOR, said that it could be revolutionary.
If the telescope could return to the same spot in the sky every two nights instead of every four, that could benefit other research.
It would be another impact of the algorithm that doesn't have to do with asteroids. Software now can do things that would not have been possible in the past.
Dr. Lu had the same goals a decade ago, but THOR offers a different way to accomplish them.
Back then, B612 wanted to do a much more expensive project. The nonprofit was going to build and operate a telescope.
The leaders of B612 were frustrated by the slow pace of the search for dangerous space rocks. Congress mandated in 2005 that NASA locate and track 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids with diameters of more than 500 feet by 2020. The deadline passed with less than half of the asteroids found.
It was difficult for B612 to raise $450 million from private donors because NASA was considering a space telescope of its own.
The Rubin Observatory was given the go-ahead by the National Science Foundation.
The Rubin Observatory will make its first test observations about a year from now. Rubin observations together with other asteroid searches could finally meet Congress's 90 percent goal.
NASA is speeding up its planetary defense efforts. The asteroid telescope is in the preliminary design stage and is expected to be launched in the year 2026.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission will slam a projectile into a small asteroid and measure how much that changes the asteroid's trajectory. China's national space agency is working on a mission.
B612 can contribute with less expensive research endeavors like THOR, instead of wrangling a telescope project costing almost half a billion dollars. Last week, it was announced that it had received over a million dollars in gifts. The foundation received a grant from a company that will match up to $1 million from other donors.
He said that B612 and Dr. Lu are not just trying to save the world.
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