Lu leads the team that developed THOR. And they harness massive computing power to compare points of light in various images of the night sky. Then match the visual puzzle pieces together to track an asteroid’s path through the solar system.
And with the initial demonstration performed by Moeyens complete, 104 new asteroids have been spotted.
There is so much information that it gets confusing. NASA, the European Space Agency, and others have individual ongoing asteroid searches. All of them have to parse through telescope images with thousands or even 100,000 asteroids in them.
Some of the telescopes searching the heavens can’t take multiple images of the same region on the same night. So, it can be difficult to distinguish if the same asteroid is appearing in multiple photos taken at different times. But THOR easily makes the connection.
“What’s magical about THOR is, it realizes that out of all those asteroids, this one in a certain image, and this one in another image four nights later, and this one seven nights later are all the same object and can be put together as the trajectory of a real asteroid,” Lu says.
