Saturday, May 4, 2024

4453 - ASTEROID DISCOVERIES - how many are there?

 

-    4453  - ASTEROID  DISCOVERIES  -  how many are there?   The key to protecting Earth from being hit by asteroids is knowing where all these are. We have discovered over 27,000 overlooked asteroids in old telescope images.   Asteroids in our solar system had been overlooked in existing telescope images.

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---------------  4453    -  ASTEROID  DISCOVERIES  -  how many are there?

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-   Thanks to a new AI-powered algorithm, we now have a catalog of these asteroids. The scientists behind the discovery say the tool makes it easier to find and track millions of asteroids, including potentially dangerous ones that might strike Earth someday. It is for those threatening space rocks that the world would need years of advance warning before trying to deflect them away from our planet.

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-    Most of the newfound asteroids hover in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where scientists have already cataloged over 1.3 million such rocky shards over the past 200 years. The latest bounty, discovered in about five weeks, also includes about 150 space rocks whose paths glide them within Earth's orbit;  however, none of these "near-Earth asteroids" seem to be on a collision path with our planet.

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-    Other asteroids are “Trojans” that follow Jupiter in its orbit around the sun. Astronomers conventionally find new asteroids by studying pockets of our sky over and over again, through telescope images gathered multiple times each night, usually every few hours.

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-    While planets, stars and galaxies in the background remain unchanged from one image to the next, asteroids are spotted as specks of light that move noticeably, which are then flagged and verified. From there, orbits of these asteroids are determined and monitored.

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-    This is really a job for AI.  The algorithm Lu's team developed, known as “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery”, or THOR, analyzed over 400,000 archival images of the sky maintained by the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, NOIRLab.

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-    As long as there are about five observations in 30 days associated with the same pocket of the sky, the algorithm can get to work. It's trained on a large dataset that makes it capable of analyzing as many as 1.7 billion light dots in just a single telescope image. It is designed to scope out and connect a point of light from one image of the sky to another one in a different image, and determine whether both specks represent the same object.  More often than not, that indicates an asteroid moving through space.

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-    The scientists scaled their algorithm using Google Cloud, whose computational heft and data storage services made it easier for the scientists to test out thousands of orbits of asteroid candidates.

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-   Not only can we find asteroids in datasets that were never meant for it, but we can make every other telescope in the world better at finding asteroids.  It's a change in how astronomy is done.

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-    In 2022, THOR was used to discover 100 asteroids that had been undetected in existing telescope images. Other teams of astronomers have also leveraged AI to find new asteroids. Citizen scientists spearheaded training of an algorithm that led to the discovery of 1,000 new asteroids in archival images clicked by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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-     Last July, a software named “HelioLinc3D” designed to hunt for near-Earth asteroids found a 600-foot-wide space rock expected to approach within 140,000 miles of Earth. That's closer than the average distance between our planet and the moon.

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-    Scientists have so far spotted over 2,000 such "potentially hazardous asteroids" and estimate about 2,000 more are yet to be discovered. Detecting these space rocks in an effort to aid planetary defense is one of the tasks of the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, for which the asteroid-hunting HelioLinc3D software was developed.

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-   The new 8.4-meter telescope, which is scheduled to start operations next year, will take images of the southern sky every night for at least a decade, each image covering 40-full-moons of area. Scientists say this cadence, supported by AI-based software like THOR and HelioLinc3D, could help the observatory find as many as 2.4 million asteroids, double than those now cataloged, in its first six months of operations.

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May 1, 2024        ASTEROID  DISCOVERIES  -  how many are there?                   4450

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