Asteroid Institute, a program of B612 Foundation, announced today the release of a publicly available Precovery service that can both confirm and refine the orbits of asteroids by rapidly searching through a collection of astronomical data that has been curated and hosted on Google Cloud. The service, which runs on the Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform and its unified observational dataset, can provide results in a matter of minutes for a task that typically takes astronomers days or months (if starting from scratch) to complete.
The utility of this ADAM::Precovery service is illustrated by three recent use cases. Earlier this week, Asteroid Institute scientists found a collection of previously unattributed images of the newly discovered Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) 2022 SF289 as found by the team at Vera C. Rubin Observatory. ADAM::Precovery was also used by the Institute to refine the orbits of 28 PHAs tracked on the NASA and ESA Risk Lists. Finally, the commercial company Karman+ has been working with Asteroid Institute to use precovery in finding observations of Near Earth Asteroids that could be potential targets for space missions. Discovering additional observations can play a significant role in refining the orbits of these targets.
"Our Precovery service is now available for astronomers and space mission operators worldwide to query a number of astronomical datasets where they may discover previously unattributed points of light belonging to moving objects," said Asteroid Institute Executive Director, Dr. Ed Lu. He continued, "These additional observations can be used to increase the orbital precision of these objects." Precovery runs on the open-source ADAM astrodynamics platform using the computational and storage capabilities in Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Kubernetes Engine. The combined ADAM::Precovery service searches through the ADAM Unified Observational Dataset, which currently includes data from the Zwicky Transient Facility and NOIRLab Source Catalog (DECam and other telescopes). Additional surveys will be available in the near future.
"By smart and skillful usage of Google Cloud compute and storage systems, B612 has been able to extract the maximum possible information from existing astronomical data to identify unknown asteroids, improve our prediction of their orbits and estimate the probability of possible collisions with our planet," said Massimo Mascaro, Technical Director in Google Cloud's Office of the CTO. "Being able to scale to hundreds of machines quickly and on-demand, these astronomical computations are an indispensable capability for this team, allowing them to efficiently leverage resources and to perform computations that would not be possible otherwise. We strongly believe this cloud-based approach will ultimately be the determining factor in democratizing advanced computation in science, ultimately benefiting us all."