A team of scientists has developed a new method that could significantly speed up the process of determining the distances to asteroids, a crucial step in understanding their orbits and potential threat to Earth.
We all know that asteroids are out there, that some of them come dangerously close to Earth, and that they've struck Earth before with catastrophic consequences. The recent discovery of asteroid reminds us of the persistent threat that asteroids present. There’s an organized effort to find dangerous space rocks and determine how far away they are and where their orbits will take them.
A team of scientists has developed a method that will help us more quickly determine an asteroid’s distance, a critical part of determining its orbit. Asteroids whose closest approach to the Sun is less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU) are known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs). (A small number of NEOs are comets.) There are more than 37,000 NEOs, and while potential impacts are rare, the results can be catastrophic. Considering what happened to the dinosaurs, there’s not much room for complacency or hubris. Large asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt (MAB) are easier to study. Their large sizes mean they produce a bigger signal when observed, and astronomers can more easily determine their orbits. However, the MAB holds many smaller asteroids around 100-200 meters. There could be hundreds of millions of them. They’re big enough to devastate entire cities if they strike Earth, and they’re more difficult to track. The first step in determining their orbits is determining their distances, which is challenging and takes time. Recent research submitted to The Astronomical Journal presents a new method of determining asteroid distances in much less time. It’s titled “Measuring the Distances to Asteroids from One Observatory in One Night with Upcoming All-Sky Telescopes” and is available at arxiv.org. The lead author is Maryann Fernandes from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) should see its first light in July 2025. One of its scientific objectives is to find more small objects in the Solar System, including asteroids, by scanning the entire visible southern sky every few nights. If it moves and reflects light, the VRO has a good chance of spotting it. However, it won’t automatically determine the distance to asteroids. The Vera Rubin Observatory is poised to begin observations in 2025. It could detect 130 Near Earth Objects each night. Image Credit: Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA/B. Quint “When asteroids are measured with short observation time windows, the dominant uncertainty in orbit construction is due to distance uncertainty to the NEO,” the authors of the new paper write. They claim their method can shorten the time it takes to determine an asteroid’s distance to one night of observations. It’s based on a technique called Topocentric parallax is based on the rotation of the Earth. In a 2022 paper by some of the same researchers, the authors wrote that “Topocentric parallax comes from the diversity of the observatory positions with respect to the center of the Earth in an inertial reference frame. Observations from multiple observatories or a single observatory can measure parallax because the Earth rotates.” In the two years since that paper, the researchers have refined their method. The research expands on previous algorithms and tests the technique using both synthetic data and real-world observations. “In this paper, we further develop and evaluate this technique to recover distances in as quickly as a single night,” the authors write in the new paper. “We first test the technique on synthetic data of 19 different asteroids ranging from ~ 0.05 AU to ~ 2.4 AU.” The figure below shows the results of the test with synthetic data. Each asteroid was observed six times in one night, and two different equations were employed to process the data. This figure shows the measured and true distances to 19 asteroids as part of the method’s test. In this test, each asteroid was observed six times in one night. The top shows Measured distance (AU) versus True distance (AU) for all 19 asteroids considered in this analysis. Each panel is based on a separate equation that can be employed in the method. “We see the fit from Eq. 1 for the group of asteroids yielding precise distances with relatively good agreement with true distances,” the authors write. Image Credit: Fernandes et al. 2025. The researchers also tested their method by taking 15 observations of each asteroid over five nights (3 per night). In this test, Equation 1 performed poorly, while Equation 2 performed well. This scenario featured 15 observations taken over 5 nights, with three observations per night. Equation 1 produces poor distance agreement, while with Equation 2, the distance recovery improves. Image Credit: Fernandes et al. 2025. Of course, the distance to the asteroid affected the accuracy of the measurement
ASTEROIDS SPACE OBJECTS ORBIT DETERMINATION NEAR EARTH OBJECTS VERARUBIN OBSERVATORY TOPOGRAPHIC PARALLAX DISTANCE MEASUREMENT
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