Artificial intelligence finds more than 20 thousand asteroids hidden in the Solar System

In many films, an asteroid hitting the Earth is the reason for the beginning of the end of the world and a dystopian future. This makes it common for the fear of an asteroid impact on the planet to be common among people. Fear is justified when a mass extinction on the planet has already happened because of such an event.

To avoid these surprises of the Solar System, asteroids are monitored with the interest of several space agencies. It is common for asteroids to pass close to Earth and even some rocks reach the planet without much damage. Although sensational news about possible asteroids are common since they win the interest of the people.

A new artificial intelligence tool will help to map the asteroids present even more accurately. The tool was created by the research group of the B612 Foundation that since 2002 has been studying asteroid trajectories and how to protect the Earth from impacts. Artificial intelligence has already found more than 20,000 asteroids that were unknown until then.

Asteroids

Asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the Sun in different types of orbits and interact gravitationally with the planets. For the most part, they are remaining rocks from the formation of the Solar System. Part of the asteroids are located in a region between Mars and Jupiter called the asteroid belt.

Some of these asteroids are pulled by the intense gravitational field of the planet Jupiter and are called Trojan asteroids. In this way, Jupiter is a natural defence for planet Earth preventing asteroids from reaching the interior of the Solar System pulled by the Sun. Most asteroids that have a trajectory close to the Earth are monitored.

Mass extinction

One of the mass extinctions that life on planet Earth has already suffered was the extinction of the Cretaceous-Paleogene. Evidence of the high concentration of metals present only in asteroids suggests that an impact caused extinction. It is estimated that about 75% of the terrestrial fauna and flora were extinct during this time.

It is estimated that the asteroid was just over 10 kilometres in diameter and hit the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago. The crater associated with the impact is the Chicxulub crater about 180 kilometres in diameter. The fact is enough for the fear of asteroid impacts and the technology to change the trajectory is in the interest of agencies and researchers.

DART Mission

On September 26, 2022, the world followed when a probe collided with the 160-metre asteroid called Dimorphos. The mission aimed to change the trajectory of the asteroid through the impact and transport of kinetic energy. The mission was successful and managed to change the asteroid’s orbit by shortening it for 33 minutes.

This was the first time that a test of this type was done with the objective of changing the trajectory of an object in the Solar System. The purpose of the mission was to study the possibility of changing the trajectories of possible asteroids that may pose danger to the Earth. Hence the need to map the asteroids of the Solar System.

Artificial Intelligence

With more asteroids mapped, earlier it is possible to build and plan missions such as the DART mission. Few known asteroids are large enough to offer danger but the search for them still exists. Thinking about this problem, the group of researchers from the B612 Foundation proposed the use of artificial intelligence.

The tool they built was a model trained with images of the sky and capable of classifying more than 1 billion points of light. The focus of the model is to classify asteroids found in these images. The result was that artificial intelligence was able to classify about 27,000 asteroids.

Most of these asteroids found are in the famous Asteroid Belt that is located between Mars and Jupiter. The others are, for the most part, asteroids that accompany Jupiter’s orbit. The interest is to find large objects that could offer danger to the Earth.

Change in the search for asteroids

With the use of this tool, the team argues that it is possible to improve the search for asteroids with the use of telescopes. This makes it easier to find larger objects and plan missions if necessary. Artificial intelligence emerges as a tool to accelerate and bring more accurate results.

Hopes are in the estimated Vera Rubin telescope to go active next year. With the observations of the Solar System, it is estimated that it is possible to find millions of objects scattered throughout the system.

News reference:

B612 Foundation 2024 Asteroid Institute and Google Cloud Identify 27,500 New Asteroids Press-release