Secondly, to demonstrate a platform where significant breakthroughs could be “‘industrialized’ over an accelerated timeframe, in a way that is useful for America’s space program.” “Firstly, apply machine learning techniques and technologies to the challenge of Planetary Defense–specifically, PHAs or Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. “ was established to do two things,” said Parr. Those smaller objects, those “city-killers,” are the focus of NASA’s Grand Asteroid Challenge, which prompted the creation of the FDL. NASA currently estimates that fewer than 10 percent of NEOs smaller than 1,000 feet, and less than one percent of those smaller than 330 feet, are known. Something only slightly larger–say, over 500 feet in diameter–could easily wipe out a whole city, or much of an entire country. If it had come in at a more direct angle, it could have killed people. That meteor came in at a shallow angle, from the direction of the Sun, making it impossible for astronomers to have spotted it in advance and it was only 26,455 pounds and 65.6 feet wide. Think back to February 2013, and the Russian city of Chelyabinsk– more than a thousand people were injured from the shockwave of an asteroid exploding 18.6 miles above them. The real risk is a PHA that’s small enough to avoid detection, but still powerful enough to kill.Ī compilation video of footage of the Chelyabinsk meteor event, 2013. The risk of a planet-wide extinction-level event happening because of an asteroid or comet strike is negligible–that would require objects larger than six miles in diameter, and we’re pretty confident we know both where they all are and that they won’t cross paths with the Earth any time soon. Astronomers currently believe there to be roughly 4,700 in total. We’ve recorded 1,726 of those so far, and we know there are more. They’re the ones that come within 0.05 AU of Earth when crossing its orbit, or just under 20 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, and which are more than 140m across. The most interesting ones, though, are a subset: the Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, or PHAs. The global database of known NEOs–all 14,761 of them–is kept by the IAU’s Minor Planet Center. Any object that comes within 45 million kilometers of us–just under a third the distance from the Sun to Earth–gets classed as an NEO, and rated for risk accordingly. In the 1990s, NASA began focusing on so-called Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) in response to a growing realization that anything could hit us, at any time, without much warning. We know that because we’ve been tracking a lot of them for more than a decade. ![]() “This new approach of combining big data, powerful computing, and machine learning has the potential to expand more complex aspects of asteroid deflection,” said James Parr, FDL’s co-director.Įven if we don’t know when it’ll happen, a large asteroid will eventually collide with Earth–and not just because of the scars from previous impacts that are scattered across the globe, providing evidence of a statistically inevitable repeat of history. Machine learning is quietly reshaping much of our world, so it makes sense to use it to deal with problems that occur outside of it as well. Similar methods are being used in almost every field, often with striking success–from diagnosing cancer patients more quickly in hospitals, to predicting future human behavior from video clips in AI labs and from companies like Apple, which are making personal-assistant AIs more intuitive and helpful than ever before, to improving real-time translation with services like Google Translate. Just ignore all that business with the nuclear bombs and time travel. It’s not the all-encompassing AI Skynet from the Terminator movie series, but it’s along the same lines. We’ve turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning–in essence, teaching a computer how to learn by itself, so that it becomes better and better at a set task without needing a human programmer to fine-tune it. NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is pioneering a new approach, however, which could dramatically improve our chances of responding to a threatening object hurtling toward us. The logo of NASA’s Frontier Development Lab.
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