Let’s take a break from our various earthly concerns — threats to democracy and the constitution, climate chaos, war, pandemic, whatever. Let’s worry instead about city-killing asteroids from space. Honestly, it’s far less stressful.
If you’ve thought at all about asteroids recently, it’s probably due to an announcement late last year that astronomers spotted a distant space rock flying our way, with an estimated arrival time in the year 2032. Dubbed YR4, the asteroid is of sufficient size — perhaps as wide across as a football field — to do some real damage if it lands in the wrong place. At first, scientists at NASA and the European Space Agency calculated the odds of YR4 hitting Earth at a slightly concerning 3%; however, continued observations downgraded the probability of a strike to virtually zero (but with a 1.7% chance of hitting the moon.)
Also following YR4’s progress was a nonprofit organization called the B612 Foundation, a small, philanthropy-supported team of scientists that studies asteroids — those millions of rocky objects that litter the solar system, orbiting the sun just like Earth and the other planets. Cofounded 22 years ago by Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, a seminal advocate of the need for asteroid awareness and defense, the B612 Foundation has helped galvanize global response to the occasional but very real risk of harmful space rock strikes.
Schweickart’s efforts led to the creation of international teams to protect the planet and its inhabitants, including the U.N.’s Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and the ESA’s Planetary Defence Office. Other groups involved in asteroid protection include the Minor Planet Center and the International Asteroid Warning Network. Such groups were activated when scientists spotted the YR4 asteroid heading our way.
“It’s 100% certain that we’ll get hit by an asteroid that will cause regional damage,” said Danica Remy, president and board director of the B612 Foundation. “We just don’t know when it will be.”
Given the vast costs involved, the exploration of space — or the management of space-related threats like asteroids — has traditionally been the job of national governments and aerospace companies; however, the B612 Foundation has demonstrated how relatively small amounts of philanthropic money can efficiently leverage increasingly powerful technology to play a central role in a matter that affects the entire planet.
Just ask the dinosaurs: assessing the asteroid threat
A large enough asteroid can change the world — just ask the dinosaurs. When the Chicxulub asteroid of 66 million years ago struck in the Yucatán, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, it exploded with the force of 4.5 billion Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, an earthshaking blast believed to have caused massive climate disruption that led to the extinction of about 75% of all life on Earth, including all the nonavian dinosaurs. The good news is that NASA has already spotted nearly all such extinction-level asteroids in our region of the solar system, and, well, there probably aren’t any such planet killers threatening us in the foreseeable future.
The slightly less-good news is that scientists know there are plenty of undiscovered asteroids out there large enough to do local but significant damage. For instance, there was the house-sized asteroid that exploded over the Russian province of Chelyabinsk in 2013 with a blast equivalent to about 30 atomic bombs, damaging buildings across the province. Fortunately, no one was killed, but nearly 1,500 were injured, mostly by broken glass. And in 1908, an asteroid estimated to be 90 to 190 meters across landed in Siberia (Russia has bad luck with asteroids) with even greater destructive power, flattening 2,000 square kilometers of forest — an area larger than New York City.
Millions of objects in the solar system, such as the countless asteroids that reside in the belt between Mars and Jupiter, pose no threat to Earth — they simply aren’t heading our way. Here’s another bit of space terminology relevant to this story: asteroids, meteors, meteorites — they’re all words for the same object. They’re asteroids when they’re orbiting in space, just being a large rock; they’re meteors when they hit Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in a streak of light (aka shooting star); and whatever hasn’t vaporized and makes it to the ground is a meteorite.
Scientists estimate that we share the solar system with as many as 3 million near-Earth asteroids larger than the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk. Currently, asteroid specialists have catalogued about 35,000 of them, which means we know of fewer than 1% of the local asteroids with enough mass to cause a serious problem — should they have Earth’s coordinates in their address book.
The B612 Foundation emphasizes the importance of knowing when and where asteroids may hit, and thus enabling preparation, including perhaps evacuation. In addition, asteroid scientists at NASA and elsewhere are developing methods to divert asteroids away from our planet. In one recently tested technique, NASA’s 2022 DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), crashed a spacecraft into asteroid Dimorphos 7 million miles away, successfully shifting its path. Another possible deflection method, called a gravity tractor, would fly a spacecraft into position beside an asteroid so the spacecraft’s mass would impart gravitational force on the asteroid over time, slowly altering its trajectory.
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How the B612 Foundation harnesses big data to spot asteroids
Maybe you’ve been wondering, as I did, about the name of the B612 Foundation. The name is inspired by the 1943 novella “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, about a young prince who lives alone on a small asteroid — called B612. Though the book has long been a classic piece of children’s literature, few people seem to get the reference, Remy admitted.
Part of the B612 Foundation’s founding mission was to help develop methods, such as those described above, to deflect asteroids. But the team eventually decided quite reasonably that NASA was best suited to that task, Remy said. “So the real issue was that we needed to accelerate the rate of asteroid discovery,” she said, “because you can’t protect yourself from something that you don’t know is coming.”
Finding asteroids by examining telescopic images and data is a slow and difficult process — we’re talking about space rocks a few meters across that are millions of miles away. B612 is leveraging powerful cloud computing technology to discover, map and understand the precise orbits of thousands of new asteroids through the development of an open-source astrodynamics computing platform called ADAM (Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping). After importing billions of images and data collected from several astronomical telescopes into ADAM, the B612 team announced last year that it had found some 27,500 new asteroids, most of them in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, but including about 150 near-Earth asteroids.
“These computational tools and platforms allow us to look through massive amounts of data,” Remy said. “As a small team of under 10 people, we became the largest asteroid discoverer in the world, and we don’t own a telescope.” The team has analyzed over 7 billion images from eight telescopes, and they’re continuing to integrate more telescope data. For now, they’re just looking for asteroids, but the B612 team’s long-term goal with the ADAM platform is both discovery and continuous tracking of asteroids — essentially building a dynamic map of the solar system.
Central to B612 Foundation’s asteroid-searching tools is computing technology from Google Cloud. “Google is a philanthropic supporter, but they’re also a key strategic partner,” Remy said. “They’ve been quite critical in the advancement that we’ve made over the last five years, and more recently, in the news (of asteroid discoveries) that we released last year.”
More asteroid discoveries are sure to come: B612 is partnering with the Vera Rubin Observatory currently under construction on a mountaintop in Chile: That facility’s powerful 8.4-meter telescope, expected to become operational this year, will use new technologies to examine space in greater detail than ever, providing yet another mountain of data for B612 to analyze in its search for near-Earth objects.
Philanthropy, by the way, has played an important role in the creation and ongoing support of astronomical telescopes. I wrote about funding for some of these telescopes a few years ago (including Vera Rubin Observatory), not long after the James Webb Space Telescope was launched and began beaming back images of objects in the universe older and more distant than humans had ever seen.
Who’s supporting B612’s work to safeguard the planet?
B612 Foundation has not received any government support, nor does it draw support from larger philanthropic foundations. Its primary financial backing comes from individual donors, many of whom are active participants and advisors in the organization. Perhaps it takes a special breed of tech-savvy enthusiast to get involved in supporting asteroid science — including folks like internet pioneer Vint Cerf and astrophysicist Brian May (who also happens to have a job playing guitar for the English rock band Queen.)
Laurie Girand and her husband Scott McGregor, both tech industry veterans, are also B612 supporters. Laurie has worked or consulted for Apple Computer and other well-known computer companies; Scott is a former CEO of semiconductor maker Broadcom Corp. and has held executive positions at other tech firms. They first met Schweickart in the early 2000s, when the former astronaut was in the process of putting the B612 Foundation together.
At the time, Girand said, the couple’s philanthropy focused on issues like injustice, but as self-described science and science fiction nerds, they were drawn to the asteroid cause. “We understood that we were one of very few philanthropic couples that understood the power and potential of using big data to map space,” Girand said. “It is rare to see a nonprofit put such scientific smarts together to tackle a large question and get results so quickly.”
