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Ed Lu wants to save Earth from killer asteroids.

Or at least, if there’s a large space rock coming our way, Dr. Lu wants to find it before it hits us – hopefully with years of advance warning and a chance for humanity. to deflect.

On Tuesday, Dr. The B612 Foundation, a nonprofit group that Lu helped found, announced that it had discovered more than 100 asteroids. (The foundation’s name is a reference to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children’s book “The Little Prince”; B612 is the main character’s main asteroid.)

This alone is not remarkable. New asteroids are always reported by sky watchers around the world. This includes amateurs with backyard telescopes and robotic surveyors systematically scanning the night sky.

What is remarkable is that B612 has not made a new telescope, or even made new observations with existing telescopes. Instead, B612-funded researchers applied cutting-edge computational power to years-old images—412,000 of which are in digital archives at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab—to sift out asteroids from 68 billion points of cosmic light. captured in images.

“This is the modern way of doing astronomy” said.

The research adds: “planetary defense” efforts undertaken by NASA and other organizations worldwide.

Today, of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth asteroids at least 460 feet in diameter, only 40 percent have been found. The other 60 percent—about 15,000 space rocks, each with the potential to release the equivalent of a hundred million tons of TNT in a collision with Earth—go undetected.

B612 collaborated with Joachim Moeyens, a graduate student at the University of Washington, and Mario Juric, a PhD advisor, professor of astronomy. They and their colleagues at the university’s Research Institute for Dense Data in Astrophysics and Cosmology have developed an algorithm that can examine astronomical images not only to identify points of light that could be asteroids, but also to find which points of light in images taken. different nights are actually the same asteroid.

In essence, researchers have developed a way to discover things that have been seen but not noticed before.

Typically, asteroids are discovered when the same part of the sky is photographed multiple times during one night. Part of the night sky contains many points of light. Distant stars and galaxies remain in the same order. But objects much closer within the solar system move rapidly and their positions change during the night.

Astronomers refer to a series of observations of a single object moving during a single night as a “track”. A tracker provides an indication of the object’s motion and signals astronomers where to look for it another night. They can also search for older images for the same object.

Many astronomical observations that are not part of systematic asteroid searches will inevitably record asteroids, but only in a single time and place, not the multiple observations needed to assemble the scouts.

The NOIRLab images, for example, were primarily taken by the Victor M. Blanco 4 Meter Telescope in Chile as part of an examination of almost one-eighth of the night sky to map the distribution of galaxies in the universe.

Additional spots of light were ignored because they were not what astronomers were studying. Dr. “They’re just random data in random images of the sky,” Lu said.

But Mr. Moeyens and Dr. For Juric, a single point of light that is not a star or galaxy is a starting point for their algorithm, which they refer to as Scoutless Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or THOR.

The motion of an asteroid is determined precisely by the law of gravity. THOR creates a test trajectory corresponding to the observed light point, assuming a certain distance and speed. It then calculates where the asteroid will be on the next and previous nights. If a dot of light appears in the data, it could be the same asteroid. If the algorithm can tie together five or six observations over several weeks, it’s a promising candidate for an asteroid discovery.

In principle there are an infinite number of possible test trajectories to examine, but this would require an impractical infinity to calculate. In practice, because asteroids cluster around certain orbits, the algorithm has to consider several thousand carefully chosen possibilities.

Still, calculating thousands of test orbits for thousands of potential asteroids is a huge number-conflict task. But the advent of cloud computing – enormous computing power and data storage distributed over the internet – is making this possible. Google invested time in this effort on the Google Cloud platform.

“It’s one of the coolest apps I’ve ever seen,” said Scott Penberthy, director of applied AI at Google.

So far, scientists have eliminated about one-eighth of the data from a single September 2013 month from the NOIRLab archives. THOR has produced 1,354 possible asteroids. Many were already in the asteroid catalog maintained by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. Some had been observed before, but only overnight and the tracker wasn’t enough to confidently determine a trajectory.

The Minor Planet Center has so far confirmed 104 objects as new discoveries. The NOIRLab archive contains seven years of data suggesting there are tens of thousands of asteroids waiting to be found.

“I think it’s wonderful,Said Matthew Payne, director of the Minor Planet Center, who was not involved in the development of THOR. “I think it’s extremely interesting and at the same time it allows us to make good use of the archival data we already have.”

The algorithm is currently configured to find only main belt asteroids that orbit between Mars and Jupiter and may collide with our planet, not near-Earth asteroids. Asteroids close to Earth are more difficult to identify because they move faster. Different observations of the same asteroid can be separated further in time and distance, and the algorithm needs to multiply more numbers to establish the connections.

“It will certainly work,” said Mr. Moeyens. “There’s no reason why it couldn’t. I just didn’t really get a chance to try it.”

THOR not only has the ability to discover new asteroids in old data, but it could also change future observations. For example, Vera C. Rubin ObservatoryFormerly known as the Large Synoptic Research Telescope, it is currently under construction in Chile.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Rubin Observatory is an 8.4-metre telescope that will repeatedly scan the night sky to watch what has changed over time.

Part of the observatory’s mission is to study the large-scale structure of the universe and detect distant exploding stars, also known as supernovae. Closer to home, it will also detect a multitude of small planetary objects orbiting the solar system.

A few years ago, some scientists suggested that the Rubin telescope’s observing patterns could be adjusted so that it could identify more asteroid trackers and thus find more dangerous, yet undiscovered asteroids more quickly. But this change could have slowed down other astronomical research.

If the THOR algorithm proves to work well with the Rubin data, then the telescope won’t need to scan the same part of the sky twice at night, but instead will allow it to cover twice as much area.

“In principle, this could be revolutionary, or at least very important,” said Zeljko Ivezic, director of the telescope and author of a scientific paper that describes THOR and tests it against observations.

If the telescope could return to the same spot in the sky every two nights instead of every four, this would benefit other research, including the search for supernovae.

Dr. “This will have another effect of the algorithm that has nothing to do with asteroids,” Ivezic said. “This beautifully illustrates how the landscape has changed. The science ecosystem is changing because software can now do things that you couldn’t even imagine 20 or 30 years ago.”

Dr. For Lu, THOR offers a different way to achieve the same goals he had ten years ago.

At the time, the B612’s eye was an ambitious and much more expensive project. The nonprofit would build, launch and operate its own space telescope, called Sentinel.

At that time, Dr. Lu and B612’s other leaders are frustrated by the slow pace of their search for dangerous space rocks. In 2005, Congress authorized NASA to find and track 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids with a diameter of 460 feet or more by 2020. But lawmakers never provided the money NASA needed to accomplish the mission, and the deadline was less. Half of these asteroids have been found.

Raising $450 million from private donors to secure Sentinel was difficult for B612, especially since NASA was considering a space telescope that found an asteroid of its own.

When the National Science Foundation gave permission to build the Rubin Observatory, B612 reconsidered its plans. Dr. “I can quickly turn around and say, ‘What’s a different approach to solving the problem we’re here to solve?’ we can say,” he said.

The Rubin Observatory will make its first test observations in about a year and will be operational in about two years. Dr. Ten years of Rubin observations, along with other asteroid searches, could eventually meet Congress’ 90 percent goal, Ivezic said.

NASA is also stepping up its planetary defense efforts. The asteroid telescope, called NEO Surveyor, is in preliminary design, aiming to launch in 2026.

And later this year, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test mission will smash a projectile into a small asteroid and measure how much that changes the asteroid’s trajectory. China’s national space agency is working on a similar mission.

For B612, he could contribute with cheaper research efforts like THOR, rather than discussing a telescope project that costs almost half a billion dollars. Last week, it announced that it received a $1.3 million gift to fund further work on cloud-based computational tools for asteroid science. The foundation has also received a grant of up to $1 million from other donors for Tito’s Handmade Vodka.

B612 and Dr. Lu they are no longer just trying to save the world. “We are the answer to the trivial question of how vodka relates to asteroids.” said.