Asteroid Tracking: Can JPL Prevent End of the World with This New Tool For Incoming Asteroids?

JPL has confirmed Earth experienced a near miss on Sunday night as an asteroid passed near the planet, dodging it by a “mere” 300,000 miles, a report said Monday.

Astronomers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory spotted the asteroid, referred to as a Near Earth Object or NEO, using an experimental computer program that detects and tracks space rocks that pass close to Earth and are potentially harmful.

The program, called NEO Scout, is now being tested at JPL and alerts scientists using data from different telescopes around the globe.
Once Scout detects a potential asteroid, it makes a quick calculation to assess what risk Earth could suffer, as other telescopes are advised to report additional observations that would confirm any real danger.

JPL astronomer Paul Chodas tells NPR that NASA finds at least five asteroids at any given night. The tricky part is how could anyone figure out which of these new objects could hit Earth.

“When a telescope first finds a moving object, all you know is it’s just a dot, moving in the sky,” says Chodas. “You have no information about how far away it is. The more telescopes you get pointed at an object, the more data you get, and the more you’re sure you are how big it is and which way it’s headed.”

NASA says the number of discovered NEOs now tops 15,000, with an average of about 30 more added each week. Surveys funded by NASA’s NEO Observations Program account for more than 95 percent of the discoveries.

Sunday night’s asteroid is the latest discovery – a rather small asteroid, about 50 to 115 feet in size – that has been designated as 2016 TB57. When it came close to Earth, it was just beyond five times the distance of the moon.

“Objects can come close to the Earth shortly after discovery, sometimes one day, two days, even hours in some cases,” JPL’s Davide Farnocchia told NPR. “The main goal of Scout is to speed up the confirmation process.”

Astronomers estimate that only about 27 percent of the NEOs that are 460 feet and larger have been found to date. Congress has earlier directed NASA to find over 90 percent of objects this size and larger by the end of 2020.

The NEO Observations Program is a primary element of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Officer, which is responsible for finding, tracking and characterizing potentially hazardous NEOs, issuing warnings about possible impacts, and coordinating U.S. government planning for response to an actual impact threat.