AI program finds ‘possibly hazardous’ 600-foot-wide asteroid, a first in astronomy

The first space rock has been found by a new artificial intelligence algorithm designed to look for potentially deadly near-Earth asteroids.

The first space rock has been found by a new artificial intelligence algorithm designed to look for potentially deadly near-Earth asteroids. (Photo: Independent)

New asteroid is predicted to pass 140,000 miles (225,000 kilometers) of Earth

In an article from SPACE, the asteroid, which has a diameter of around 600 feet (180 meters), has been given the designation 2022 SF289 and is predicted to pass within 140,000 miles (225,000 kilometers) of Earth. This distance is less than the average distance between our planet and the moon, which is 238,855 miles (384,400 km). The rock is close enough to qualify as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA), but it doesn’t necessarily indicate it will strike Earth anytime soon.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is currently being built in Northern Chile. The HelioLinc3D application was created to assist with the observatory’s impending 10-year survey of the night sky by looking for space rocks in close proximity to Earth. As a result, the system may play a key role in alerting scientists to space objects headed for Earth.

Vera C. Rubin researcher Ari Heinze noted in a statement that the finding of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer by demonstrating the practical usefulness of the algorithms Rubin will employ to search for thousands of yet-unknown possibly dangerous asteroids.

The solar system is home to tens of millions of space rocks, from dwarf planets the size of the moon to asteroids only a few feet across. The material that initially formed the planets 4.5 billion years ago is what remains in these space rocks.

Some of these objects have orbits that bring them rather close to Earth, despite the fact that the majority of these objects are far from Earth and are concentrated in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Occasionally dangerously close.

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Posted in INDEPENDENT, Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are celestial bodies that pass within a few million miles of Earth, and potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) are celestial bodies that approach within five million miles. However, this does not imply that they will have an impact on the globe. No known PHA provides an impact danger for at least the next 100 years, just as it does with SF289 in 2022. To make sure asteroids are not headed for a collision with the planet, astronomers look for potentially dangerous asteroids and track their orbits.

Before Rubin is finished, an efficiency test of the asteroid-hunting algorithm using data from the ATLAS survey in Hawaii led to the discovery of this new PHA.

Rubin is finished. This involved seeing whether it could locate an asteroid among data that had already been gathered, data that had too few observations for the algorithms in use at the time to thoroughly search.

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