Information Technology
Trajectory Service from Asteroid Institute Empowers Mission Planners and Public Researchers
"We're excited to continue our partnership with the Asteroid Institute, expanding the scale, capabilities, and availability of space mapping platforms like ADAM. By combining our products—including Firebase, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Google Cloud Storage—with open data and code, complex solutions such as trajectory analysis are now truly accessible to all. This empowers scientists and engineers everywhere with the tools to easily characterize the complex and dynamic trajectory of any solar system object, profoundly impacting our ability to protect our planet and safely explore our corner of the galaxy," said Will Grannis , CTO, Google Cloud.
The ADAM::Trajectory online trajectory service offers several important features made possible by the compute infrastructure of Google Cloud:
The new ADAM::Trajectory service provides advantages for a wide range of space professionals:
"This service is a very useful utility for mission planners at all levels in the space community. For years, this kind of trajectory analysis has been a bottleneck, with different groups often using their own custom solutions," says "ADAM::Trajectory changes that. It standardizes our capabilities, reduces setup and debugging time, and makes high-precision trajectory planning accessible. Our customers can now explore mission opportunities themselves, and our team is less reliant on a few individuals for this critical work. This will save us significant time and money and improve our approach to mission design."
This launch follows the Asteroid Institute's recent release of , a new service for projecting and visualizing impact risk of individual Near-Earth asteroids. The demo allows users to independently calculate impact probabilities for objects on risk lists published by JPL and ESA. It also supports follow-up on newly detected but unconfirmed risk objects flagged by JPL's Scout system. The Institute plans to support user-submitted orbits for custom analysis in the future.
Additionally, the Asteroid Institute offers the , a hosted version of its open-source precovery service backed by multiple catalogs. This service enables users to search for previously undetected observations of celestial bodies in archival data, significantly refining their orbital paths. ADAM::Precovery, ADAM::Trajectory and ADAM::Impact Probability are available for public and scientific use.
"With ADAM::Trajectory and ADAM::Impact Probability running on Google Cloud we can provide services that can run at scale which will contribute to how space missions are planned and how asteroid risks are understood," said .
A United States based nonprofit, founded in 2002, develops tools and technologies to understand, map, and navigate our solar system and protect our planet from asteroid impacts through its Asteroid Institute program and supporting educational programs, including Asteroid Day and the Schweickart Prize. Founding Circle and Asteroid Circle members and individual donors from 46 countries support the work financially. For more information, visitB612foundation.org or follow on social: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or Bluesky.
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