Risk Corridor of near-Earth asteroid 2010 RF12 with potential impacts on September 6 2095 created with ADAM:: Impact Probability tool

Asteroid Institute has launched a demo of ADAM::Impact Probability, a new tool for projecting and visualizing impact risk of individual  Near-Earth asteroids over the next 75 years. The demo, available at https://b612.ai/platform/impact-probability/, allows users to independently calculate impact probabilities for objects on risk lists published by JPL and ESA, and also allows follow-up on newly detected but unconfirmed risk objects flagged by JPL’s Scout system. In the future, we plan to support user-submitted orbits for custom analysis as well.

The tool begins by letting users select an object from one of three orbital databases: JPL SBDB, ESA NEOCC, or JPL Scout. Once a valid orbit is retrieved, users can define a time window for the simulation. The system will then generate 10,000 orbit variants sampled from the object’s orbital covariance and run a Monte Carlo simulation to detect potential impacts over that timeframe. The current demo is limited to 10,000 samples and Earth/moon impacts only, but you can contact us for early access to larger Monte Carlo runs.

An asteroid may have multiple windows in which it poses a potential impact risk. If the simulation detects one or more impacts with the earth or moon, the results are clustered by time and are displayed along with key statistics and visualizations for each “impact cluster.” We provide cumulative and per-cluster impact probabilities, as well as a 3D simulation of the variant orbits at the time of impact. In the case of Earth impacts, an impact corridor is also shown. Those interested in deeper analysis can download the raw data, which includes orbital variants and impact events, in Parquet format.

 

ADAM::Impact Probability is built on the same open-source libraries used in our analysis of asteroid 2024 YR4. When YR4 appeared on ESA’s Risk List earlier this year, we used these tools to monitor its changing impact risk and were among the first teams to note the current ~4% probability of impact with the Moon on December 21, 2032. These same libraries are available to the public through adam-core, which can be installed and used to run similar analyses on objects of interest.

It’s important to keep in mind that risk list object orbits are frequently updated as new observations are made, so these impact predictions will also evolve. While this tool provides useful visualizations of potential future scenarios, such as Earth impact risk corridors, we expect these outputs to evolve over time. Therefore, we advise against using the demo’s findings for public announcements or media dissemination without stating the date on which the observations were accessed. Additionally, because the demo uses a limited number of simulations, it may not detect very unlikely impact events.

Learn how to use ADAM::Impact Probability with a short video tutorial. If you have any comments or questions, or if you are interested in using our Impact Probability services on a larger scale, feel free to contact us at https://b612.ai/contact/

 

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Nate Tellis is an Asteroid Institute software engineer working on developing and scaling ADAM services on the cloud, as well as providing clean and clear web and API interfaces for use by the astronomical community. Nate spent several years as a staff scientist with the UC Berkeley Department of Astronomy and holds his Bachelor of Science in Physics and Computer Science from McGill University, Montreal.

 

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