Our engineering team has made significant strides in advancing the tools and technology that power the Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform. Over the past year, we’ve focused on refining the core infrastructure and open-source libraries, bringing more precision, efficiency, and scale to asteroid discovery and mapping.

A major focus has been on improving the accuracy and memory efficiency of key processes like orbital transformations and integrating with advanced propagators. One important shift has been moving from the PYOORB propagator to ASSIST, an open-source propagator developed with Matt Holman. ASSIST closely mirrors the precision of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) models and allows us to produce highly accurate orbital calculations while keeping the system open-source.

In addition to this, we’ve made substantial enhancements to the THOR (Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery) algorithm. Among many other improvements, THOR is now able to run in constant memory space, making it possible to run on commodity hardware and enabling the discovery of thousands of new asteroids from existing astronomical data.

We’ve also focused on scaling our infrastructure to meet the demands of processing massive datasets. Much of our computation now runs on Google Cloud, using Kubernetes for job orchestration and BigQuery for data handling. This setup has significantly reduced the memory footprint of our processes while allowing for faster, more efficient computations. In our recent large-scale analysis, we processed over 8.5 million CPU hours in a matter of weeks, handling enormous amounts of data with ease.

Beyond improving the technical capabilities, we’ve worked to ensure that these tools are accessible and scalable for both internal use and the broader scientific community. By packaging many of these improvements in open-source libraries, we hope to further collaboration and innovation across the field of asteroid discovery.

The ongoing refinements and expansions to ADAM and our open-source tools will continue to support our goal of mapping and understanding our solar system more effectively. These advancements are critical to improving asteroid detection, enhancing planetary defense efforts, and contributing to the scientific community’s broader understanding of small bodies in space.

View Open-source Libraries on Github

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Asteroid Institute brings together scientists, researchers, and engineers to develop tools and technologies to understand, map, and navigate our solar system. A program of B612 Foundation, the Asteroid Institute leverages advances in computer science, instrumentation, and astronomy to find and track asteroids. Please support our mission and make a donation today.