NASA’s AI Detects 11 Asteroids That Pose DANGER To Our Planet

Over 7 lakh asteroids have been found in space. Asteroids are small, rocky objects that orbit the Sun. Asteroids frequently visit Earth’s neighbourhood as our planet’s gravitational forces affect them. Asteroids can bring tsunamis, shock waves and flattening winds that could be catastrophic. Asteroids, if hit Earth, can bring tsunamis, shock waves and flattening winds that could be catastrophic. The space rocks approach towards the Earth due to the gravitational forces that affect them. Most of the asteroids will never pose a threat to our planet, but a very tiny percentage will indeed come close. Modern telescopes and other observational tools can give astronomers a good idea of which space rocks are approaching towards Earth, but relying on humans to scour for these possibly dangerous asteroids means that some may be overlooked and missed entirely. However, to see many possibly dangerous asteroids we have missed, researchers from the Netherlands built an Artificial Intelligence (AI) network.

After running the simulation and looking as far as 10,000 years into the future, the AI gave some shocking results. A total of 11 asteroids that were not on NASA’s list of potentially hazardous objects were cited as being of potential concern. Yes, you read it right.

“We now know that our method works, but we would certainly like to delve deeper in the research with a better neural network and with more input,” Portegies Zwart, a member of the research team, explains. “The tricky part is that small disruptions in the orbit calculations can lead to major changes in the conclusions,” he added.

The paper has been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Recently, Earth had a very close encounter with A huge asteroid identified as 163373 (2002 PZ39), which was bigger than the world's tallest building. During the flyby, asteroid 2002 PZ39 reached a speed of more than 34,000mph. Asteroid 2002 PZ39 had zip past the planet from a distance of about 5.77 million kilometers (approximately 3.59 million miles). One astronomical unit is the distance from our planet to the Sun or about 93 million miles (149.6 million km). The distance could be seemed very long but in astronomical terms, the space rock was very close. Fortunately, asteroid 2002 PZ39 failed to collide with our planet or else massive casualties would have occurred.

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Last year, many giant asteroids including 2019 OK, 2019 OD, 2015 HM10, 2019 OE, 2019 NN3, 2019 MB4, 2019 MT2, 2006 QV89, 2016 NO56M, RF12, and others approached towards the Earth, fortunately, did not hit our planet.

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