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ddahlen

1,486 karma · joined September 4, 2024

I calculate orbital dynamics of comets/asteroids/dust in the solar system.

https://github.com/dahlend/kete

Previously worked in quantum computing in both hardware (transmons) and writing compilers.

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ddahlen··on 2024YR4 Collision Chance is now 1.9%
Wikipedia's source is: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=2024%20Y...

It is currently moving away from us as it does its little dance around the sun. It will likely soon be too faint to see going forward until sometime in mid to late 2029, when we will likely see it again with NEO Surveyor, and likely the Vera Rubin LSST telescopes. It will spend most of that time with an apparent magnitude of probably fainter than 29. Once we spot it again in 2028/2029 time frame then there is a very high likely-hood that we will know its orbit well enough to know if it will miss or not (again, low, but not zero chance of impact).

You can view the current best fit orbit here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%...

Source: I write asteroid orbit calculation code for my day job. What I say here is unrelated to my employers, and should not in any way be construed as any official statement.

ddahlen··on Exploring Nine Simultaneous Transients on April 12th, 1950 (2021)
yeah it has corrections for GR of sun/jupiter/earth, along with J2 terms for those, and the 5 most massive asteroids.

Typically matches JPL Horizons results to sub 100km over a decade for vast majority of objects.

Optionally accepts non-grav forces as well.

ddahlen··on Exploring Nine Simultaneous Transients on April 12th, 1950 (2021)
I work on asteroid/comet orbit calculations for my day job. I had not actually seen this paper before, though I have done some detective work in old Palomar images in the past: https://caltech-ipac.github.io/kete/tutorials/palomar.html

I spent a few minutes and downloaded the image frame they cite in the paper and ran it through a similar analysis looking for known asteroids, and there were no known asteroids in that patch of sky at that time (didn't really expect any, as I would expect them to be causing a visible streak over the 10 minutes of exposure). Neat paper though!

ddahlen··on Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
I can tell you how I do it, but again I am not an impact study person. It helps to understand a bit of the background of how we fit orbits in general:

1) someone with a telescope sees something moving (typically these days these are bigger surveys)

2) These observations are submitted to the Minor Plant Center (MPC), the clearinghouse of all asteroid/comet observations.

3) Several groups pull observations from the MPC to fit orbits, including JPL Horizons (MPC also fits orbits)

4) You now have a pile of observations which you have to figure out which observation links to other observations, which is a complex math problem on its own. Solve that.

5) JPL Horizons for example then fits the orbits to the observations, and since the observations may be 100 years of data of wildly varying quality, from hand written notes in the 1920s through to modern data, this is very difficult. They publish a covariance matrix with the associated fit (IE: basically a gaussian error fit for the parameters).

6) I grab that covariance matrix and sample from it using some pretty vanilla statistics to build orbits.

7) Propagate and see what happens.

Here is an example of an observation from 1950: https://caltech-ipac.github.io/kete/tutorials/palomar.html The image was developed on a glass plate, this one was never even sent in to the MPC, the guy taking the observation just wrote down "Asteroid" on the cover slip for the image. It was not formally discovered until the 1980s. We now know its orbit very well, so this particular observation is not that interesting other than as a curiosity.

Here is an example of an orbit fit by JPL Horizons: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=c%2F2...

Note the "condition code" on the right, which is a score of how good their orbit fit matches the data, 0 means we know the orbit with high precision. This one is an 8, meaning we have a fit, but its not that great. Most likely because we only have 31 days of observations.

ddahlen··on Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
It's a bit of both, observing has uncertainty in a lot of places, if you are on the ground you get atmospheric effects, imprecision of timing, imprecision of optics, etc etc. You are also observing an object where you dont know how far away it is. That distance has to be solved by basically doing a sort of triangulation, which requires either the observer or the object to move enough. So if you observe over a short time (hours for example), you can see it is moving, but it is hard to tell distance.

Once you have an estimated orbit, if it has any interactions with planets (IE: flyby of Earth), small differences in positions during the close encounter make LARGE differences decades later. Add to this the effects of photons from the sun pushing on the smaller asteroids or dust, or out-gassing /dust from comets cause these objects to slightly drift from just the basic gravitational forces. Generally inner solar system asteroids (inside mars) are very chaotic over hundreds of years, though typically predictable less than a century.

Note that I am not an expert on impact calculations, I just know a bit about and and can do back of the envelope ones. There are a number of ways to get to the ~1%, the orbit fits have uncertainties on them and those can be propagated forward in time. However there are all sorts of complexities with doing that, and often the easiest method is to sample the uncertainty region a few hundred thousand times (Monte-carlo), and propagate those and see what hits.

ddahlen··on Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy
I work on the Near Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) writing simulation code which predicts which objects we will see. This one has drummed up a bit of interest due to its (relatively) high chance of impact. I actually spent quite a bit of time yesterday digging through archive images trying trying to see if it was spotted on some previous times it came by the Earth (no luck unfortunately). Since we saw it so briefly, our knowledge of its orbit is not that great, and running the clock back to 2016 for example ended up with a large chunk of sky where it could have been, and it is quite small. We will almost certainly see it again with NEO Surveyor years before its 2032 close encounter. I have not run a simulation for it, but I would not be surprised if LSST (a large ground telescope survey which is currently coming online) to catch it around the same time NEO Surveyor does.

Our knowledge of the diameter of this object is a bit fuzzy, because of surface reflectivity, small shiny things can appear as bright as dark large things. This is one of the motivations of making the NEO Surveyor an IR telescope, since IR we see black body emission off of the objects, which is mostly size dependent, and only weakly albedo dependent.

There is an even tinier chance that if it misses the Earth in 2032, it could hit the moon. I haven't run the numbers precisely for that one, but it impacted a few times in some monte-carlo simulations.

If anyone is interested in orbit dynamics, I have open sourced some of the engine we are using for observation predictions: https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/kete

It is relatively high precision, though JPL Horizons has more accurate gravitational models and is far better suited for impact studies. My code is primarily for predicting when objects will be seen in telescopes.

ddahlen··on All asteroids in Solar System, visualized
I have recently managed to open source some of our tools which we use on the NEO Surveyor mission to simulate all of the asteroids. However my code lacks any real sort of visualizations:

https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/kete

(note that installation is about 100mb, as it carries a large data file containing high accuracy positions of the planets for +- 100 years)

ddahlen··on Small asteroid to hit Earth's atmosphere today
There are sort of two major camps in the field, the astronomers and the people who fly satellites. Having the thing you are measuring able to talk to you and get doppler measurements of its velocity is invaluable for orbit determination, so the modern techniques for the satellite group have probably continued to advance. Unfortunately on my side of the fence, rocks usually dont talk back and we have less information available for fitting. For a vast majority of the time all we get for asteroids are visible observations, which is very limited geometric information. The algorithms here have not advanced a whole lot for a looong time, Gauss famously developed the first optimization technique to find Ceres. The field still regularly uses "Gauss's Method" for orbit determination. There have been a few small improvements to numerical integrators, but the field as a whole tends to use the "tried and true" methods of the past. I had to go on ebay and get a bunch of texts from the 60s-80s as they are often the best, even now. The field is very very tiny, think maybe dozens to hundreds in the whole world.
ddahlen··on Small asteroid to hit Earth's atmosphere today
We have spotted a grand total of 2 interstellar objects, they were moving faster, but are many orders of magnitude less numerous then the local stuff.

Just doing some back of the envelope calculations, looks like Omuamua was moving about 165,000km/hr (relative to Earth) when it was about at Earths orbital distance.

This speed is not actually a crazy number, it is a lot faster than the majority of things which could hit us, but there are geometries of things in our solar system which can reach these relative velocities. (For example things in retrograde, IE: reverse orbits) can lead to basically escape velocity + earths velocity.

ddahlen··on Small asteroid to hit Earth's atmosphere today
We got enough data to get a rough estimate of its orbit before it hit: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=2024%...

Note though, this will likely have a huge range of uncertainty on it, as 8 hours of observation is not a lot.

ddahlen··on Small asteroid to hit Earth's atmosphere today
I am in the rather lengthy process of open sourcing a library for orbit propagation, but the previous art which is somewhat modern is the python rebound package. It's original design intent was for asteroid collision simulations, but it has been generalized a lot since then.

Most of the state of the art in the field is algorithms from the 60s/70s, the classic software which many people use are packages like Mercury, written in either fortran or C++.

These factors are why I am attempting to release my code to the (small) community.

ddahlen··on Small asteroid to hit Earth's atmosphere today
The range of mass is typically much larger than the range of velocities. There is an upper bound to the speed for the vast majority of things which are dangerous (escape velocity of the solar system). However there are orders of magnitude differences in mass.

Velocity is important though.

ddahlen··on Small asteroid to hit Earth's atmosphere today
I work on the NASA NEO Surveyor project (and have helped out a lot on the WISE/NEOWISE mission, which found a lot of asteroids). I create and run simulations of asteroid detections, which ends up being mostly orbit calculations. In the next few years the rate of detections of these sort of objects are going to go way up, NEO Surveyor and the Vera Rubin LSST telescopes are going to take our current knowledge of the solar system from about 1.4 million asteroids to approximately 10x that. It is somewhat difficult to estimate how many we will see, since the size distribution follows a power law, and small changes in our estimates of the slope can be huge changes the number which exist.

There are most likely hundreds of thousands to millions of a few meter sized asteroids flying around the inner solar system.

I did a large chunk of the numerical analysis in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.12918

I recommend figure 12 to get a sense of how far we can see at any given moment.

The definition which is commonly used as "hazardous" is about a 140m asteroid, which would cause a significantly bad day regionally, but not end civilization. That being said, 50m is still a very very bad day.

These meter-ish size ones usually just make a pretty fireball.

Some various links to data about this impact:

https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=2024%20R...

https://minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K24/K24R68.html

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