Getting ahead of Earth-bound asteroids with Gaia.

Now that we’ve got the horrible title out of the way, let’s get to the actual point. Since 2014, ESA (The European Space Agency) has had a space observatory (very cool) called ”Gaia”  scouring the night sky for potentially new asteroids. Wait, no. The goofballs at ESA miscalculated a bunch of stuff and the actual observing was delayed until 2016, meaning that the observatory just sat in space for like 2 years doing nothing. Anyways.

The Gaia project is actually quite vast. ESA’s plan was to use the space observatory for creating the most accurate map of our galaxy to date. The article i read however only focuses on it’s uses for asteroid discovery. Let’s discuss that.

Since 2016, after all the mishaps, Gaia was finally fully operational. Since 2016, Gaia has been running automated processes and released over 1700 alerts of potentially new asteroid discoveries. It has filtered out most of the other objects in space, detecting only asteroids. Imagine how much work this takes off of the hands of astronomers. Whenever they see an asteroid in the night sky, they won’t have to spend tons of time checking whether it’s a new one, an old one or the Tesla Roadster that Elon Muskrat chucked into our orbit for no reason. Gaia will look for these asteroids all by itself and inform you of them, filtering out the Roadster.

Although Gaia is quite a magnificent piece of work, it is not perfect. We humans still have to run checks via observatories located on earth (boring) to verify that the alerts are indeed of new asteroids. This isn’t actually that much work though, because Gaia does include approximated locations of the asteroids along with the alerts. From the launch of Gaia to the date my source was published, astronomers had looked for 250 of these potential asteroid discoveries, leading to the detection of 227 of them. There’s also some boring information about the ”AlErT rElEaSe InTeRfAcE” and whatnot  but let’s not focus on that (very boring). That’s not what you’re here for.

Now, why did you need this information? In fact, why would anyone need this information? It may bring you comfort that the sky is being watched for massive asteroids about to obliterate our planet (bad for the environment). I’m sure that at some point in the future we will start mining these asteroids for precious resources and having a map of them would certainly help out with that.  Also, it would be quite anticlimactic and not fun at all for NASA to spend a bunch of time and money on a mission to send the first human to Mars only for the cool spaceship to be gadooshed by an undiscovered asteroid.

Although Gaia’s results were hampered by its slightly anticlimactic launch, it has still been a great success so far. Unfortunately, it’s trip is coming to an end quite soon. It is expected to run out of fuel by 2025. However, the data it has provided will keep astronomers busy for years to come. They still have over 1450 alerts to double check, not to mention the work that has to be done to achieve the main purpose of this observatory, which is to map out our galaxy. I look forward to seeing it on Google Street View.

Blog post written by Emil Sjöblom

Source: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2021/04/aa39579-20/aa39579-20.html#S7