The First Privately Funded Killer Asteroid Spotter Is Here

If we don't watch out for asteroids, they could crash into our world again, with devastating consequences. The Asteroid Institute has started a project to track as many of them as possible.

Lu, a former NASA Astronaut and executive director of the institute, led a team that developed a novel algorithm called THOR, which harnesses massive computing power to compare points of light seen in different images of the night sky, then matches them to pieces together an individual asteroid's path through the solar They discovered 104 asteroids with the system.

While NASA, the European Space Agency, and other organizations have their own ongoing asteroid searches, all of them face the challenge of analyzing telescope images with thousands or even 100,000 asteroids in them. It's difficult to tell if the same asteroid is appearing in multiple photos taken at different times because some telescopes don't or can't take multiple images of the same region on the same night. It is possible that THOR can connect them.

Out of all those asteroids, this one in a certain image, and this one in another image four nights later, and this one seven nights later are all the same object and can be put together as the trajectory of a real asteroid. It is possible to determine if the object is on a trajectory bound for Earth by tracking it as it moves. Older computers wouldn't have been able to do such a task. The importance of computation is shown by this. The reason for this is that computation is cheap and ubiquitous.

Astronomers typically spy asteroids with a tracklet that is measured from multiple images. Researchers can use six or more images to reconstruct the asteroid's route. If the data is incomplete, the asteroid will remain unconfirmed or untrackable. It is possible to determine the path of an asteroid if THOR is used.

There are other data sets that NASA benefits from. Almost any of them can be used by THOR. There's a data set where you can look for asteroids. The Asteroid Institute fellow and graduate student at the University of Washington says that is one of the cool things about the algorithms. They searched billions of images taken from telescopes in the National Optical Astronomy Observatory by using a sensitive camera mounted on a 4-meter telescope.