How the Asteroid Institute Defends Earth from Asteroids

In this episode of The Quantum Feedback Loop Podcast, we speak with Alec Koumjian and Joachim Moeyens, researchers from the B612 Foundation's Asteroid Institute, about the vital mission to protect Earth from potentially devastating asteroid strikes.

Alec shares, among many topics, the Institute's achievements since speaking with us over two years ago. Since then, the team has continued to build a suite of software and engineering applications for asteroid discovery, including visualization tools and open-source resources freely available for citizen scientists to calculate impact probabilities for known and recently discovered objects. Asteroid discovery is especially important following the success of NASA's 2022 DART mission that tested asteroid-deflection technology.

Joachim explains how the Institute is responsibly incorporating AI into their work, describing the innovative THOR algorithm and how new data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory - currently in its pre-survey phase and already producing impressive results - is contributing to their research, among many other topics. Watch the full episode to learn about the THOR algorithm, public-access ADAM Platform, their "secret sauce," and much more!

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