Seattle researchers are hunting for asteroids with the power of THOR

Hollywood loves to tell stories about asteroids heading toward Earth and human endeavors to overcome the threat.

In real life, though, there are people of Earth doing this work every day — even if it's not as exciting as "Deep Impact" or "Armageddon."

"I'll let Hollywood decide what looks the best on screen," said Joachim Moeyens, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute whose work involves less cinematic tasks than those that make the big screen. "But I would love to see a movie really talk more about the anticipation of an impact and all the societal consequences of knowing that there might be an impact in the future."

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Moeyens is doing new research that recently located 27,000 previously unknown asteroids, including about 100 near Earth. Computers find and track the asteroids using an algorithm Moeyens developed called "THOR," or Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery. That algorithm has improved the process, effectively allowing telescopes to multitask; the telescopes can monitor asteroid movements to find new ones. The algorithm can also look at archived data that wasn't meant to monitor for asteroids, and use it to find more.

Moeyens' THOR was activated in 2022, four years after he started working on it.

"THOR comes at a cost," Moeyens explained. "It takes a lot of computational power. A single iPhone 15 would have to be running that algorithm for 160 years to be able to extract these asteroids. Now, of course, if you're on Google Cloud, and you have access to a lot of computing power, you can do it in five weeks, like we did."

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That also adds up to finding those 100 near-Earth asteroids. So, we asked: Should we be watching those more closely?

"I'm happy to report that for those, we're not in any danger," Moeyens confirmed. "These don't really come that close to the Earth."

But what if?

"There are people that are working from the discovery component, like I am," Moeyens explained, "all the way down to disaster mitigation."

The key, according to Moeyens, is all about warning time.

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"It's about finding these asteroids as soon as possible, so that if there is one that's on a collision course, with Earth, we have enough time to do something about it," he said.

The remarkable thing is we actually live in a time period where we can actually do something about an asteroid impact. In 2022, NASA launched the DART mission, slamming a golf-cart-sized spacecraft into an asteroid to alter its trajectory.

"The sooner that we can discover these objects," Moeyens said, "the sooner that we can kind of understand how they're moving through the solar system and understand that trajectory relative to Earth."

You can listen to Soundside's entire conversation with Dr. Joachim Moeyens by clicking the play button above.