“The first version of Sentry was a very capable system that was in operation for almost 20 years,” said Javier Roa Vicens, who led the development of Sentry-II while working at JPL as a navigation engineer and recently moved to SpaceX.
#Nasa asteroid watch list software#
CNEOS has monitored the impact risk posed by NEAs with software called Sentry, developed by JPL in 2002. Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the Center for Near Earth Object Studies ( CNEOS) calculates every known NEA orbit to improve impact hazard assessments in support of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office ( PDCO). So, astronomers use sophisticated impact monitoring software to automatically calculate the impact risk. Asteroids are extremely predictable celestial bodies that obey the laws of physics and follow knowable orbital paths around the Sun.īut sometimes, those paths can come very close to Earth’s future position and, because of small uncertainties in the asteroids’ positions, a future Earth impact cannot be completely ruled out. Popular culture often depicts asteroids as chaotic objects that zoom haphazardly around our solar system, changing course unpredictably and threatening our planet without a moment’s notice. In anticipation of this increase, NASA astronomers have developed a next-generation impact monitoring algorithm called Sentry-II to better evaluate NEA impact probabilities.
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But as larger and more advanced survey telescopes turbocharge the search over the next few years, a rapid uptick in discoveries is expected. To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky, adding new discoveries at a rate of about 3,000 per year.
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