Biography

Dmitrii Vavilov joined our team as a postdoctoral fellow in November 2024, following two years as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Paris Observatory. Dmitrii specializes in probabilistic analysis of dynamical and physical properties of small bodies, light-curve processing and cometary shape evolution.

While at the Paris Observatory, Dmitrii created a monitoring system for impact probability computation, similar to NASA JPL’s Sentry system. The algorithm utilizes fast and robust modeling of an asteroid’s uncertainty region to estimate its collision probability with the Earth. In order to determine reliable asteroid orbits and collision probabilities, accurate on-sky positional measurements acquired over a long time span are important. An added advantage of the algorithm employed in the system developed by Dmitrii is the ability to assist in “precovery” searches for asteroids in archived telescope images or old photographic plates. This can lengthen the baseline of observations used to compute an asteroid’s impact probability, providing more accurate results.

Dmitrii’s work at DiRAC will continue to benefit planetary defense efforts through a NSF grant, which is partially funded by a generous gift from Charles Simonyi, and held by DiRAC Affiliate Professor, Sarah Greenstreet. Their work will combine data science with solar system dynamics to better characterize the distribution and evolution of orbits, thermal processing, and physical properties of the more than one hundred thousand near-Earth objects that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time is expected to detect. The project will also help uncover where potentially hazardous asteroids reside that are currently difficult to track.