Asteroid Institute brings together scientists, researchers, and engineers to develop tools and technologies to understand, map, and navigate our solar system. A program of B612 Foundation, the Asteroid Institute leverages advances in computer science, instrumentation, and astronomy to find and track asteroids. Since 2002, the Foundation has supported research and technologies to enable the economic development of space and enhance our understanding of the evolution of our solar system.
The Asteroid Institute's goal is to help build a map of the Solar System that makes it easy to share, organize, calculate, visualize, and understand trajectories and location information for space. As with many frontiers that have come before, the opening of the space frontier will be enabled by mapping. A comprehensive map of the solar system enables scientific exploration, economic development, and the protection of the Earth from asteroid impacts. To help support this goal, we are building ADAM, the Asteroid Discovery, Analysis and Mapping computational platform.
The ADAM Platform relies on and interfaces with data from the Minor Planet Center (MPC), which operates as a clearinghouse for the orbits of objects in our solar system, and the observations from which those orbits were determined.
This year, we identified an inconsistency in the observation times submitted for data from the Dark Energy Camera (DECCam) at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. These observations have been used to determine the orbits of many asteroids, and observations with the wrong times are sitting in the MPC's data. We are interested in correcting this discrepancy, and fixing up all of the observation times held by the MPC.
