Asteroid Institute Identifies 27,500 New Asteroids!

In a collaboration between the Asteroid Institute and Google Cloud, machine learning algorithms identified 27,500 new asteroids using existing data sets from the NOIRLab Source Catalog Data Release 2 (NSC DR2). While most of the asteroids are in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, more than 100 are considered Near-Earth Asteroids. Developed by the Asteroid Institute, the algorithm is called Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR), and it "projects theoretical orbits across millions of observed moving points of light and links together those points that are consistent with real physical orbits". Join communications specialist Beth Johnson in a conversation with Ed Lu, Executive Director of the Asteroid Institute, as they discuss these results and how they affect our planetary defense outlook. (Recorded live 6 June 2024.)