A team of physicists at MIT, collaborating with Nvidia, has successfully used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and GPUs to identify and track 10-meter-sized asteroids in the main asteroid belt. This breakthrough significantly improves our ability to detect and defend against potential Earth-impacting asteroids.
If you're a fan of 1990s disaster movies, you'll know all about the potential damage that an undetected asteroid could wreak if it impacted Earth. While finding massive metallic rocks in space is relatively easy, asteroids that are just ten metres in size are far harder to spot. A team of physicists at MIT, however, has worked with Nvidia to use its GPUs to make the process a lot better and faster, with 100 tiny doom-harbingers being successfully identified and tracked.
The vast majority of asteroids orbit the Sun in a region of space called the Asteroid Belt, and they've remained there for billions of years. However, really small ones frequently get nudged out of the main belt and become NEOs—Near Earth Objects. These objects have the potential to cause significant damage if they ultimately impact Earth and over the years, there has been a more concerted effort to develop methods to scan space and find and track potential armageddon-bringers. That's relatively easy to do if they're big, but small ones—specifically 10 metres in size in the case of this research—reflect such little light that they just slip through the net.This research, led by an international team of researchers, including a global team of physicists led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nvidia, utilizes the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and its peerless ability to take super-sharp infrared images of objects in our Solar System. The team poured over hundreds of scans of the main asteroid belt, looking for the tiniest of moving dots. Figuring out whether said dots were distant objects or something far closer to us involved the use of 'synthetic tracking techniques', and that's where Nvidia's GPUs come into play. In a similar way to how GPUs can be used to predict the colours of pixels in a game's frame, the team used the GPU to speed up the process of predicting the tiny dots' orbits. Coupled with other data collated in the research, the method identified eight already-known asteroids and a further 138 unknown lumps of metallic rock. 'Today’s GPU technology was key to unlocking the scientific achievement of detecting the small-asteroid population of the main belt, but there is more to it in the form of planetary-defense efforts,' said [Quote from the Research Lead]. 'Since our study, the potential Earth-impactor 2024YR4 has been detected, and we now know that JWST can observe such an asteroid all the way out to the main belt as they move away from Earth before coming back.
ASTEROID DETECTION JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE NVIDIA GPUS PLANETARY DEFENSE MIT RESEARCH
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