2023-08-04 19:48:05
A new algorithm has detected a potentially hazardous asteroid in a survey that may protect Earth from a world-destroying space rock, as astronomers led by the University of Washington announce that its system has spotted an asteroid 600 feet across, twice the size of the Statue of Liberty, using fewer observations and more scattering than current methods. . According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, the HelioLinc3D algorithm researched space observations and identified the space rock 2022 SF289 on July 18, 2023, as the initial images of the asteroid were taken on September 19, 2022, but it was too faint to be captured by current technology. The algorithm is designed to detect near-Earth asteroids for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming 10-year night sky survey. The observatory in Chile is not yet operational, so the astronomers used observations from the University of Hawaii’s ATLAS survey. “By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software to search for thousands of potentially hazardous asteroids yet unknown, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” Ari Heinz, lead developer of HelioLinc3D and researcher at the University of Washington, said in a statement. Atlas 2022 observed SF289 on four nights, but the asteroid was too faint to capture, yet HelioLinc3D combined bits of data from all four nights and made the discovery. “Any survey would have difficulty detecting objects like 2022 SF289 that approach the sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights,” said ATLAS lead astronomer Larry Dino. Scientists know of 2,350 currently potentially dangerous asteroids, but they expect more than 3,000 asteroids to be found yet.
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