The ADAM research and development team participated in the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration (SSSC) Readiness Sprint 3.

B612 Foundation has been a sponsor of the Solar System Science Collaboration (SSSC) sprints since their inception.  This support enables the collaboration to be prepared for when LSST comes online as well as providing the Asteroid Institute and the Asteroid Decision Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) team to stay connected to the emerging scientific needs of the community.  

This year’s virtual SSSC readiness sprint was an opportunity for scientists preparing to make use of the LSST observations of objects in our solar system (including asteroids) to virtually get together and discuss the data pipeline and how they will access and use the LSST dataset. This is the third collaboration sprint.

Dr. Ed Lu, Executive Director and John Carrico, ADAM Project Manager of the Asteroid Institute presented our work on the Asteroid Decision and Mapping (ADAM) platform, and showed how our cloud-based astrodynamics platform can be used to tackle astrodynamics problems at a very large scale. With LSST expected to observe 600 thousand asteroids per night, we expect a versatile tool like ADAM to be very useful.  

John and Ed showed a particular example of how ADAM can easily and conveniently propagate and visualize the range of trajectory possibilities for an asteroid. Such calculations, called Monte-Carlo simulations, involve running forward many thousands of slightly different trajectories that are each nevertheless consistent with our observations. By looking to see how these slight varying cases diverge, we can calculate critical parameters such as the probability that a certain asteroid may impact Earth.  

You can also watch the thirty minute technical presentation to the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration here. You can learn more about our participation in the SSSC readiness sprints in 2018 here  and in 2019 here.