- 4512
- ASTEROIDS - protecting the Earth? -
The key to protecting Earth from being hit by asteroids is knowing where
all these are. More than 27,000
asteroids in our solar system had been overlooked in existing telescope images.
Thanks to a new AI-powered algorithm, we now have a catalog of them.
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-------------------------- 4512
- ASTEROIDS -
protecting the Earth?
-
- 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.
-
- 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
includes about 150 space rocks whose paths glide them within Earth's orbit; to
be clear, however, none of these "near-Earth asteroids" seem to be on
a collision path with our planet.
-
- Others are Trojans that follow Jupiter in
its orbit around the sun. Observations of these asteroids are yet to be
submitted to the official body responsible for asteroid discoveries.
-
- 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. 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.
-
- This is really a job for AI. AI tools designed for asteroid searches are
already approaching levels attainable by humans. The algorithm 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, or NOIRLab.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- In 2022,
scientists used THOR 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- The 8.4-meter telescope, which is scheduled
to start operations in 2025, 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.
-
-
June 13, 2024 ASTEROIDS -
prortecting the Earth? 4512
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