The ability of an unique algorithm created by University of Washington academics to find asteroids in the solar system has been shown. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center has certified the first candidate asteroids found by the algorithm, known as Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or THOR.
The Asteroid Institute, a B612 Foundation programme, has been using THOR to find and track asteroids on its cloud-based astrodynamics platform, Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping, or ADAM. Researchers using the Asteroid Institute's resources can submit thousands of fresh findings when the Minor Planet Center confirms these new asteroids and adds them to its registry.
"A complete map of the solar system provides astronomers with crucial insights for both science and planetary security," said Matthew Holman, dynamicist and search algorithm expert at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and former director of the Minor Planet Center. "Tracklet-free algorithms like THOR considerably increase the types of datasets that astronomers can employ to create such a map."
Mario Juri, a UW associate professor of astronomy and director of the UW's DiRAC Institute, and Joachim Moeyens, a UW graduate student in astronomy, collaborated to develop THOR. In a report published last year in The Astronomical Journal, they and their UW teammates revealed THOR. It connects light points in multiple sky photos that correspond to asteroid orbits. Unlike current state-of-the-art programmes, THOR does not demand that the telescope observe the sky in a specific pattern in order to find asteroids.
The Asteroid Institute's ADAM platform is an open-source computing system that uses Google Cloud, specifically the scalable computational and storage capabilities of Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Kubernetes Engine, to perform astrodynamics algorithms at enormous scale.
"The Asteroid Institute's work is crucial because astronomers are reaching the boundaries of what can be discovered with present techniques and equipment," Juri, who is also a senior data science fellow with the University of Washington eScience Institute, said. "Our team is excited to collaborate with the Asteroid Institute to use Google Cloud to facilitate solar system mapping."
Researchers can now conduct systematic searches of vast datasets that were previously unavailable for asteroids discovery. THOR identifies asteroids and, more crucially, calculates their orbits accurately enough for them to be identified as tracked asteroids by the Minor Planet Center.
Moeyens combed through a 30-day window of images from the NOIRLab Source Catalog, a collection of nearly 68 billion observations made by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory telescopes between 2012 and 2019, and submitted a small sample of discoveries to the Minor Planet Center for official recognition and validation. Thousands more fresh discoveries from the catalogue and other datasets are expected now that the computational discovery technique has been validated.
"Understanding our solar system, enabling space development, and protecting our planet from asteroid impacts requires discovering and tracking asteroids," said Ed Lu, executive director of the Asteroid Institute. "Any telescope with an archive can now become an asteroid search telescope with THOR operating on ADAM." We're employing huge computation to enable not only greater discoveries from existing telescopes, but also to locate and track asteroids in historical sky photos that had previously gone unreported since they weren't designed for asteroid searches."
To support these activities, the B612 Foundation has announced an extra $2.3 million in leadership grants.
This work is made possible by the collaboration of Google Cloud, B612's Asteroid Institute, and the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute.
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