Breaking

New method significantly speeds up the search for dangerous asteroids - Syfy
Jun 28, 2022 1 min, 48 secs
It’s faster and can use the vast database of observations just lying around online.

It can be enough to use the centuries-old equations of motion to create a predicted orbit for the object, and the equation describing that orbit can then be projected into the future or the past to see where it will be or was on the sky; future observations or previously archived ones can be searched to see if it’s there, and the orbit can be refined.

The idea here isn’t to track the asteroids themselves, but to create theoretical test orbits for an asteroid, which is kind of backwards from the usual way of doing things.

A test orbit is really just the equation for a made-up orbit, say one that’s circular with a distance of 300 million km from the Sun at a given tilt and orientation.

That test orbit is then projected forward or backward to the times of the other observations, which are then searched for objects that are close to that path?

No, it’s just the way the asteroid emits infrared light.

There are several advantages to this method — the Asteroid Institute has a good FAQ for explaining all this — but one that is really striking is that it doesn’t necessarily need observations taken close together in time and at a given cadence to work!

The location of a potential asteroid on a test orbit can be calculated for the time of any given observation from any observatory.

Since we know when an observation was made and also where in the sky it was taken, it’s possible to see if the potential asteroid was in that observation at that time, even if it was taken weeks ago or more. .

They used two weeks of observations from the Zwicky Transient Facility, a huge sky survey, to search for potential asteroids, and were able to recover more than 97% of previously known asteroids that appeared in the data.

That’s important because new observations can trigger thousands of alerts about potential asteroids; if these can be culled rapidly for known asteroids that’s a big time saver right there!

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED