104 asteroids are hiding in plain sight. A new tool helped discover them

A new computing tool, developed with funding from the B612 Foundation, has discovered 104 asteroids that scientists

NASA and other space agencies couldskip. All of them are potentially dangerous for the Earth. The name of the fund is a reference to the children's book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “The Little Prince”; B612 is the main character's home asteroid.

Notably, this non-governmentalthe space organization is using old data from telescopes rather than new data to detect asteroids. So, as part of a new study, they examined 412,000 images from the digital archives of the National Optical-Infrared Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab.

For the study, scientists usedrevolutionary computing technology running on the cloud-based astrodynamic platform Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) for detecting and tracking asteroids. 

The ADAM platform is a computing system withan open source software that runs astrodynamics algorithms using the scalable compute and storage capabilities of Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Kubernetes Engine. The new algorithm used to detect these new asteroids is called THOR (Traclet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery), which links points of light in different images of the sky that correspond to the orbits of the asteroids. Unlike current algorithms, THOR does not require the telescope to observe the sky in a specific pattern in order to detect asteroids. Researchers can now begin to systematically study large data sets that previously could not be used for space objects. Essentially, researchers have developed a way to detect asteroids that were hiding in plain sight.

Until now, THOR has only been used for analysisone-eighth of the data archived since September 2013, and found more than 1,300 potential asteroids. They were then compared to the asteroid catalog of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. While some asteroids had been discovered previously, 104 of the objects qualified as new objects, The New York Times reported.

The Minor Planet Center has already confirmed their existence and has added 104 of these newly discovered asteroids to its registry.

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