NASA’s Next-Generation Asteroid Impact Monitoring System Goes Online

An illustration showing the circular orbits of 2,200 potentially hazardous objects around the Sun.

This diagram shows the orbits of 2,200 potentially hazardous objects as calculated by JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). Highlighted is the orbit of the double asteroid Didymos, the target of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The new system improves the capabilities of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL’s) Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) to assess the impact risk of asteroids that can come close to our planet.

To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky, adding new discoveries at a rate of about 3,000 per year. But as larger and more advanced survey telescopes turbocharge the search over the next few years, a rapid uptick in discoveries is expected. In anticipation of this increase, NASA astronomers have developed a next-generation impact monitoring algorithm called Sentry-II to better evaluate NEA impact probabilities.

Popular culture often depicts asteroids as chaotic objects that zoom haphazardly around our solar system, changing course unpredictably and threatening our planet without a moment’s notice. This is not the reality. Asteroids are extremely predictable celestial bodies that obey the laws of physics and follow knowable orbital paths around the Sun.

But sometimes, those paths can come very close to Earth’s future position and, because of small uncertainties in the asteroids’ positions, a future Earth impact cannot be completely ruled out. So, astronomers use sophisticated impact monitoring software to automatically calculate the impact risk.

Managed by JPL, CNEOS calculates every known NEA orbit to improve impact hazard assessments in support of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). CNEOS has monitored the impact risk posed by NEAs with software called Sentry, developed by JPL in 2002.

“The first version of Sentry was a very capable system that was in operation for almost 20 years,” said Javier Roa Vicens, who led the development of Sentry-II while working at JPL as a navigation engineer and recently moved to SpaceX. “It was based on some very smart mathematics:  In under an hour, you could reliably get the impact probability for a newly discovered asteroid over the next 100 years — an incredible feat.”

But with Sentry-II, NASA has a tool that can rapidly calculate impact probabilities for all known NEAs, including some special cases not captured by the original Sentry. Sentry-II reports the objects of most risk in the CNEOS Sentry Table.

By systematically calculating impact probabilities in this new way, the researchers have made the impact monitoring system more robust, enabling NASA to confidently assess all potential impacts with odds as low as a few chances in 10 million.

A study describing Sentry-II was published in the Astronomical Journal on December 1, 2021.

More information about CNEOS, asteroids, and near-Earth objects can be found at https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov.

For more information about PDCO, visit https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense.