A new artificial intelligence algorithm programmed to hunt for potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids has discovered its first space rock.
The roughly 600-foot-wide (180-meter) asteroid has been designated 2022 SF289, and is expected to approach The earth to within 140,000 miles (225,000 kilometers). That distance is shorter than that between our planet and moon, which are an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 km) apart. This is close enough to define the rock as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA), but it does not mean that it will affect Earth in the foreseeable future.
The HelioLinc3D program, which found the asteroid, has been developed to help Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction in northern Chile, is conducting its upcoming 10-year survey of the night sky by searching for near-Earth space rocks. As such, the algorithm could be critical in helping scientists track space rocks on a collision course with Earth.
“By demonstrating the true effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to search for thousands of as-yet-unknown potentially dangerous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” said Vera C. Rubin Scientist Ari Heinze said in a statement.
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Tens of millions of space rocks roam around Solar system everything from asteroids a few feet in size to dwarf planets around the moon. These space rocks are the remnants of material that originally formed the planets about 4.5 billion years ago.
While most of these objects are located far from Earth, with the majority of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between March and Jupiter, some have orbits that bring them close to Earth. Sometimes disturbingly close.
Space rocks that come close to Earth are defined as Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and asteroids that venture within about 5 million miles of the planet are given the Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) status. However, this does not mean that they will affect the planet. As is the case with 2022 SF289, no currently known PHA poses an impact risk for at least the next 100 years. Astronomers search for potentially dangerous asteroids and monitor their orbits just to make sure they aren’t headed for a collision with the planet.
This new PHA was found when the asteroid-hunting algorithm was paired with data from the ATLAS survey in Hawaii, as a test of its effectiveness before Rubin is completed.
The discovery of 2022 SF289 has shown that HelioLinc3D can detect asteroids with fewer observations than current space rock hunting techniques allow.
Rubin is ready to join the potentially dangerous asteroid hunt
Searching for potentially dangerous asteroids involves taking pictures of parts of the sky at least four times a night. When astronomers spot a moving point of light moving in an unmistakable straight line across the series of images, they can be fairly certain they’ve found an asteroid. Additional observations are then made to better constrain the orbits of these space rocks around Solar.
However, the new algorithm can make a discovery from just two images, speeding up the whole process.
About 2,350 PHAs have been discovered so far, and while none pose a threat to hit Earth in the near future, astronomers aren’t quite ready to relax just yet because they know there are many more potentially dangerous space rocks out there that have yet to be discovered .
It is estimated that the Vera Rubin Observatory could detect as many as 3,000 hitherto undiscovered potentially dangerous asteroids.
Rubin’s 27-foot-wide (8.4-meter) mirror and massive 3,200-megapixel camera will revisit locations in the night sky twice a night instead of the four observations per night performed by current telescopes. Hence the creation of HelioLinc3D, a code that could find asteroids in the Rubin dataset even with fewer observations available.
But the algorithm’s creators wanted to give the software a trial run before the construction of Rubin is complete. This involved testing whether it could find an asteroid in data that had already been collected, data that has too few observations for algorithms currently in use to sift through.
With the ATLAS data offered as such a test subject, HelioLinc3D began looking for PHAs and on July 18, 2023 it hit paydirt and revealed 2022 SF289. This PHA was discovered by ATLAS on September 19, 2022, while it was 3 million miles from Earth. ATLAS had actually seen this new PHA three times over four nights but had not seen it four times in the same night, meaning current surveys missed it. By piecing together fragments of data from all four nights, HelioLinc3D was able to identify the PHA.
“Any survey will struggle to detect objects like 2022 SF289 that are close to its sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights,” said ATLAS lead astronomer Larry Denneau. “This effectively gives us a ‘bigger, better’ telescope.”
With the position of 2022 SF289 pinpointed, astronomers could then follow up the discovery with other telescopes to confirm the PHA’s existence.
“This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years when HelioLinc3D will detect an object like this every night,” said Rubin scientist and HelioLinc3D team leader Mario Jurić. “But more broadly, it’s a preview of the coming era of data-intensive astronomy. From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advances in algorithms as much as in new, large telescopes.”
The discovery of 2022 SF289 was announced in the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Electronic Circular MPEC 2023-O26.
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