The privately funded killer-asteroid spotter is here
Gigantic asteroids have smashed into the Earth before—RIP dinosaurs—and if we’re not watching out for all those errant space rocks, they could crash into our world again, with devastating consequences. That’s why Ed Lu and Danica Remy of the Asteroid Institute started a new project to track as many of them as possible.
Lu, a former NASA astronaut and executive director of the institute, led a team that developed a novel algorithm called THOR, which harnesses massive computing power to compare points of light seen in different images of the night sky, then matches them to piece together an individual asteroid’s path through the solar system. They’ve already discovered 104 asteroids with the system, according to an announcement they released on Tuesday.
While NASA, the European Space Agency, and other organizations have their own ongoing asteroid searches, all of them face the challenge of parsing telescope images with thousands or even 100,000 asteroids in them. Some of those telescopes don’t or can’t take multiple images of the same region on the same night, which makes it hard to tell if the same asteroid is appearing in multiple photos taken at different times. But THOR can make the connection between them.
