The Solar System group at the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington has dedicated efforts to advancing asteroid and comet discovery algorithms for large datasets and next generation surveys. Our enduring partnership with the Asteroid Institute has yielded significant progress, resulting in the development of a novel algorithm known as Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR). This innovative algorithm has been built into the Asteroid Institute’s Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform, running on Google Cloud.

Asteroid Institute, a program of B612 Foundation, and Google today announced the most significant results of this partnership to date: identifying 27,500 new, high-confidence asteroid discovery candidates.

Congratulations to the entire team!

Read more here about the details of their work and the discovery.

Featured in New York Times here.

Fierce Network article is here.

Credit: B612 Asteroid Institute / University of Washington DiRAC Institute / OpenSpace Project

Discoveries visualized in the inner Solar System. Main belt asteroid discoveries, shown in green, reside between the orbits of Mars (red) and Jupiter (brownish-gray). The Jupiter Trojans, shown in orange, lead and follow Jupiter at 2 and 10 o’clock. In light blue are Near Earth Objects (NEOs) discoveries.