The software used to assess potentially hazardous asteroids has been upgraded by NASA.
Despite decades of careful searching, there are no known space rock dangers to Earth. The new software is used for 20 years.
The Center for Near Earth Object Studies manages the database of potentially hazardous asteroids.
There are asteroids in deep space.
The objects with the most at risk to Earth will be reported by Sentry- II. Scout assesses the asteroids with only partial known orbits.
The Yarkovsky effect is a key upgrade that will make the assessments more accurate.
The Yarkovsky effect occurs when sunlight is absorbed by the asteroid and re-emitted as heat. This heat emission can affect the path of an asteroid through space, and may affect the space rock's probability of hitting Earth.
Astronomers have known about the Yarkovsky effect for a long time, but only recently have computer software become powerful enough to analyze it. JPL will be able to assess potential impacts with odds as small as a few chances in 10 million.
Davide Farnocchia, a JPL navigation engineer who helped develop Sentry- II, said that the Yarkovsky effect was a limitation.
astrophysicists had to do manual analyses every time they ran across a "special case" asteroid because of the lack of Yarkovsky calculations in the original Sentry system. One of the most famous examples was asteroid Apophis, which needed a manual assessment for the Yarkovsky effect to figure out how likely a 2068 impact would be. NASA determined that the 2068 flyby of Apophis will be harmless.
An artist's depiction of NASA's asteroid-hunting spacecraft. The image is from NASA/JPL-Caltech.
The older system couldn't always predict the impact probability of asteroids. NASA said that a more robust set of calculations can be made using Sentry-II.
With less assumptions about which ones an asteroid will take, Sentry-II is able to find low-probability impact scenarios.
As larger and more capable survey telescopes come online in the next decade, NASA said, Sentry- II will come into its own. NASA said that asteroids and observatories are adding more discoveries at a rate of about 3000 per year. As the decade continues, the pace of discovery will accelerate.
The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, which is expected to be launched in 2026, will be the last dedicated mission to search for asteroids. Within a decade of its launch, the NEO Surveyor is expected to discover 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids in size or larger.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is based in Chile. Rubin is expected to see the first light in July of 2023. Rubin was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation to search for potentially hazardous asteroids by looking at the same area of the sky hourly.
The study was published in the journal.
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