
Asteroids were responsible for extinction events hundreds of millions of years ago on Earth, providing no shortage of doomsday film plots for Hollywood.
But researchers focused on asteroid tracking are on a mission to locate them for today's real-world concerns: planetary defense.
The new and unexpected discovery tool applied in this research is NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which was tapped for views of these asteroids from previous research and enabled by NVIDIA accelerated computing.
An international team of researchers, led by MIT physicists, reported on the cover of Nature this week how the new method was able to spot 10-meter asteroids within the main asteroid belt located between Jupiter and Mars.
These rocks in space can range from the size of a bus to several Costco stores in width and deliver destruction to cities on Earth.
The finding of more than 100 space rocks of this size marks the smallest asteroids ever detected in the main asteroid belt. Previously, the smallest asteroids spotted measured more than half a mile in diameter.
Researchers say the novel method - tapping into previous studies, asteroid synthetic movement tracking and infrared observations - will help identify and track orbital movements of asteroids likely to approach Earth, supporting asteroid defense efforts.
We have been able to detect near-Earth objects down to 10 meters in size when they are really close to Earth, Artem Burdanov, the study's co-lead author and a research scientist in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, told MIT News. We now have a way of spotting these small asteroids when they are much farther away, so we can do more precise orbital tracking, which is key for planetary defense.
New research has also supported follow-up observations on asteroid 2024YR4, which is on a potential collision course with Earth by 2032.
Capturing Asteroid Images With Infrared JWST Driven by NVIDIA GPUs Observatories typically look at the reflected light off asteroids to determine their size, which can be inaccurate. Using a telescope with infrared, like the JWST, can help track the thermal signals of asteroids for a more precise way at gauging their size.
Asteroid hunters focused on planetary defense are looking out for near-Earth asteroids. These rocks have orbits around the Sun that are within 28 million miles of Earth's orbit. And any asteroid around 450 feet long is capable of demolishing a sizable city.
The asteroid paper's co-authors included MIT professors of planetary science co-lead Julien de Wit and Richard Binzel. Contributions from international institutions included the University of Liege in Belgium, Charles University in the Czech Republic, the European Space Agency, and institutions in Germany including the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the University of Oldenburg.
The work was supported by the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program.
Harnessing GPUs to Save the Planet From Asteroids The 2024YR4 near-Earth asteroid - estimated as wide as 300 feet and capable of destroying a city the size of New York - has a 2.3% chance of striking Earth.
Movies like Armageddon provide fictional solutions, like implanting a nuclear bomb, but it's unclear how this could play out off screen.
The JWST technology will soon be the only telescope capable of tracking the space rock as it moves away from Earth before coming back.
The new study used the JWST, the best-ever telescope in the infrared, on images of TRAPPIST-1, a star studied to search for signs of atmospheres around its seven terrestrial planets and located about 40 light years from Earth. The data include more than 10,000 images of the star.
After processing the images from JWST to study TRAPPIST-1's planets, the researchers considered whether they could do more with the datasets. They're looking at if they can search for otherwise undetectable asteroids using JWST's infrared capabilities and a new detection technique they had deployed on other datasets called synthetic tracking.
The researchers applied synthetic tracking methods, which doesn't require previous information on an asteroid's motion. Instead it does fully blind search by testing possible shifts, like velocity vectors.
Such techniques are computationally intense, and they created bottlenecks until NVIDIA GPUs were applied to such work in recent years. Harnessing GPU-based synthetic tracking increases the scientific return on resources when conducting exoplanet transit-search surveys by recovering serendipitous asteroid detections, the study said.
After applying their GPU-based framework for detecting asteroids in targeted exoplanet surveys, the researchers were able to detect eight known and 139 unknown asteroids, the paper's authors noted.
Today's GPU technology was key to unlocking the scientific achievement of detecting the small-asteroid population of the main belt, but there is more to it in the form of planetary-defense efforts, said de Wit. Since our study, the potential Earth-impactor 2024YR4 has been detected, and we now know that JWST can observe such an asteroid all the way out to the main belt as they move away from Earth before coming back. And in fact, JWST will do just that soon.
Gif attribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_YR4#/media/File:2024_YR4_ESO-VLT.gif
More from Nvidia
17/04/2025
Gold prospecting in Venezuela has led to a malaria resurgence, but researchers h...
17/04/2025
As the days grow longer and the flowers bloom, GFN Thursday brings a fresh lineup of games to brighten the week.
Dive into thrilling hunts and dark fantasy adv...
16/04/2025
Isomorphic Labs is reimagining the drug discovery process with an AI-first approach. At the heart of this work is a new way of thinking about biology.
Max Jade...
16/04/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on how developers, 3D practitioners, and enterprises can transform their workflows ...
15/04/2025
The final days of the AI Mathematical Olympiad's latest competition were a transcontinental relay for team NVIDIA.
Every evening, two team members on oppos...
15/04/2025
Every company and country wants to grow and create economic opportunity - but they need virtually limitless intelligence to do so. Working with its ecosystem pa...
15/04/2025
CoreWeave today became one of the first cloud providers to bring NVIDIA GB200 NV...
14/04/2025
NVIDIA is working with its manufacturing partners to design and build factories that, for the first time, will produce NVIDIA AI supercomputers entirely in the ...
11/04/2025
As a teenager, Bradley Rothenberg was obsessed with CAD: computer-aided design software.
Before he turned 30, Rothenberg channeled that interest into building ...
10/04/2025
NVIDIA this week recognized the contributions of partners in Europe, the Middle ...
10/04/2025
As AI-powered tools continue to evolve, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series and NVIDIA ...
10/04/2025
Get ready to explore the Deep South. South of Midnight, the action-adventure gam...
09/04/2025
Necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes, what a person really needs ...
09/04/2025
NVIDIA is collaborating with Google Cloud to bring agentic AI to enterprises seeking to locally harness the Google Gemini family of AI models using the NVIDIA B...
06/04/2025
This National Robotics Week, NVIDIA highlighted the pioneering technologies that...
03/04/2025
The Nintendo Switch 2, unveiled April 2, takes performance to the next level, powered by a custom NVIDIA processor featuring an NVIDIA GPU with dedicated RT Cor...
03/04/2025
Real-time AI is unlocking new possibilities in media and entertainment, improving viewer engagement and advancing intelligent content creation.
At NAB Show, a...
03/04/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores the latest techniques and real-world applications of agentic AI, chatbots and copi...
03/04/2025
GeForce NOW isn't fooling around.
This month, 21 games are joining the cloud gaming library of over 2,000 titles. Whether chasing epic adventures, testing ...
02/04/2025
In the latest MLPerf Inference V5.0 benchmarks, which reflect some of the most c...
02/04/2025
AI is rapidly transforming how organizations solve complex challenges.
The early stages of enterprise AI adoption focused on using large language models to cre...
02/04/2025
Video editing workflows are getting a lot more colorful.
Adobe recently announc...
31/03/2025
Advances in physical AI are enabling organizations to embrace embodied AI across...
27/03/2025
A new resident is moving into the cloud - KRAFTON's inZOI joins the 2,000+ games in the GeForce NOW cloud gaming library.
Plus, members can get ready for a...
26/03/2025
The reliability of the electric grid is critical.
From handling demand surges and evolving power needs to preventing infrastructure failures that can cause wil...
25/03/2025
Generative AI is unlocking new capabilities for PCs and workstations, including ...
20/03/2025
The power and utilities sector keeps the lights on for the world's populatio...
20/03/2025
Time to sharpen the blade. GeForce NOW brings a legendary addition to the cloud: Ubisoft's highly anticipated Assassin's Creed Shadows is now available ...
19/03/2025
The roots of many of NVIDIA's landmark innovations - the foundational techno...
19/03/2025
AI has been shaping the media and entertainment industry for decades, from early recommendation engines to AI-driven editing and visual effects automation. Real...
19/03/2025
NVIDIA this week recognized 14 partners leading the way across the Americas for their work advancing agentic and physical AI across industries.
The 2025 Americ...
18/03/2025
The quick-service restaurant industry is a marvel of modern logistics, where spe...
18/03/2025
Global telecommunications networks can support millions of user connections per day, generating more than 3,800 terabytes of data per minute on average.
That m...
18/03/2025
The telecom industry is increasingly embracing AI to deliver seamless connections - even in conditions of poor signal strength - while maximizing sustainability...
18/03/2025
AI agents are transforming work, delivering time and cost savings by helping peo...
18/03/2025
AI deployments thrive on speed, data and scale. That's why NVIDIA is expandi...
18/03/2025
As quantum computers continue to develop, they will integrate with AI supercomputers to form accelerated quantum supercomputers capable of solving some of the w...
18/03/2025
AI is fueling a new industrial revolution - one driven by AI factories.
Unlike traditional data centers, AI factories do more than store and process data - the...
18/03/2025
As generative AI capabilities expand, NVIDIA is equipping developers with the to...
17/03/2025
Under the hood of every AI application are algorithms that churn through data in their own language, one based on a vocabulary of tokens.
Tokens are tiny units...
13/03/2025
What's next in AI is at GTC 2025. Not only the technology, but the people and ideas that are pushing AI forward - creating new opportunities, novel solution...
13/03/2025
Bundle up - GeForce NOW is bringing a flurry of Blizzard titles to its ever-expanding library.
Prepare to weather epic gameplay in the cloud, tackling the genr...
13/03/2025
AI is leveling up the world's most beloved games, as the latest advancements...
13/03/2025
PC game modding is massive, with over 5 billion mods downloaded annually. Mods p...
10/03/2025
A new AI education initiative in the State of Utah, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA, is set to advance the state's commitment to workforce training a...
06/03/2025
For the past 16 years, NVIDIA technologies have been working behind the scenes o...
06/03/2025
Time for a roaring-good time with Capcom's hit Monster Hunter Wilds. GeForce NOW members can hunt even the largest, most daunting monsters with the sharpest...
05/03/2025
Ninety percent of information transmitted to the human brain is visual. The importance of sight in understanding the world makes computer vision essential for A...
03/03/2025
From Seattle, Washington, to Cape Town, South Africa - and everywhere around and between - AI is helping conserve the wild plants and animals that make up the i...
28/02/2025
Editor's note: This is the next topic in our new CUDA Accelerated news series, which showcases the latest software libraries, NVIDIA NIM microservices and t...