The Asteroid Institute, in collaboration with the University of Whashington, has developed an algorithm that searches for data already available to explore undiscovered space rocks.

Despite our technological advances, there are cases where events in space cannot be explained instantly at first. So it’s about asteroid detection: even though we have the tools to analyze them, it’s not easy to navigate the vast sea of ​​data – and there are some asteroids that remain undiscovered. The latter, however, can pose a serious danger.

To partially solve this problem, the Asteroid Institute was created, which is a private non-governmental organization that operates completely independently of NASA and other space agencies. The company does research and development, and not badly: an interesting algorithm was recently developed with the University of Washington to help identify asteroids that look dangerous but haven’t yet been analyzed.

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The program, or Tracketless Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (short for THOR), can predict the future location of an object. The program creates hypothetical orbits for this purpose, using the data obtained in the meantime, if there are any orbits similar to the movement of the studied space rock. Google also helps with the calculation process, so the tests performed are much faster.

The New York times According to him, building the system was not in vain: although it was only able to review a small set of data (some of this information dates back to 2013), it still found more than 1,300 classified as a candidate asteroid. The experts later compared this new data to the asteroid catalog of the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) MPC’s asteroid catalog and found that 104 of them are completely unknown.

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