Killer Asteroids are hiding in plain sight; a new tool finds them | Hacker News Reader

Killer Asteroids are hiding in plain sight; a new tool finds them

nytimes.com

19 pointszh33 comments

I read this and thought this was so cool. The tl;dr is "rather than building a telescope or satellite to search for asteroids, the organization built a cloud computing application to search existing images for dots of light that moved over time. This has been proven out in a prototype and they are planning to apply it to look for near Earth asteroids".

I believe the quote is "Haven't tried it yet", they seem optimistic it will work, but will require more compute or closer observations because they are moving much more quickly against the backdrop of stars than the more distant asteroids.

Fair. Here's the relevant quote:

   The algorithm is currently configured to only find main belt asteroids, those with orbits between Mars and Jupiter, and not near-Earth asteroids, the ones that could collide with our planet. Identifying near-Earth asteroids is more difficult because they move faster. Different observations of the same asteroid can be separated farther in time and distance, and the algorithm needs to perform more number crunching to make the connections.
   "It’ll definitely work,” Mr. Moeyens said. “There’s no reason why it can’t. I just really haven’t had a chance to try it.”

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