Novel cloud-based platform to discover hidden asteroids

B612 Foundation's Asteroid Institute has found a new way of discovering hidden asteroids in existing datasets. The novel cloud-based method has found and validated 104 new asteroids, opening the possibility of using the novel cloud-based method to find hundreds or thousands of new asteroids, as well as changing the way we search for asteroids with new telescopes, the B612 Foundation said on Tuesday.

The Asteroid Institute's Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform, an open-source computational system that runs astrodynamics algorithms at a massive scale in Google Cloud, hunts for asteroids in our solar system. While previous methods have relied on specific telescopic survey operations, the new method uses enormous computational power to discover asteroids.

The algorithm used to discover these new asteroids - Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) - can identify asteroids and calculate their orbits meeting criteria by the Minor Planet Center to recognize them as tracked asteroids. It eliminates the need to rely on the asteroid tracklets in the data - hence the name 'Tracklet-less'.

The THOR algorithm runs on ADAM. Google Cloud enables the cloud-based astrodynamics platform to scale by allowing it to run on thousands of machines simultaneously, making it possible to analyze the data in a reasonable amount of time.

"These asteroids were hidden not because they couldn't be seen (they were there all along in existing observational images of the sky), but because we previously did not have the computational power to recognize them in those datasets," Google Cloud wrote in a blog post.

"One of the most powerful aspects of the partnership between B612 and Google Cloud is to make ADAM a "discovery-as-a-service" platform available for future researchers," Massimo Mascaro, Distinguished Technical Director, Applied AI, and Scott Penberthy, Director of Applied AI at Google Cloud, wrote in the post.

More information can be found here.