B612 FOUNDATION

Our goal is to develop tools and technologies to understand, map, and navigate our solar system and protect our planet from asteroid impacts.

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 in addition to supporting educational programs, including Asteroid Day.

We have assembled a world's class technical and scientific team who are capable and experienced.

It is a historic year for us and for humanity. In the last year, we announced we have officially become asteroid discoverers with the public announcement in The New York Times about our first 104 asteroid discoveries using ADAM and THOR. And, for the first time in history, humans have intentionally changed the trajectory of an asteroid.

Since our community of supporters enabled us to launch the Asteroid Institute, a program of B612, five years ago, our work has focused on building tools and technologies to understand, map, and navigate our solar system and protect our planet from asteroid impacts. This investment enabled us to build out the Asteroid Decision Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform as well as the “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery” (THOR) algorithm that made our asteroid discoveries possible.

Ken Chang said it well in his May 31, 2022, New York Times article when he wrote “What is remarkable is that B612 did not build a new telescope or even make new observations with existing telescopes. Instead, researchers financed by B612 applied cutting-edge computational might to years-old images — 412,000 of them in the digital archives at the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab — to sift asteroids out of the 68 billion dots of cosmic light captured in the images.”

The astrodynamic services at the heart of ADAM are being developed by our growing team of researchers, software developers, and astrodynamicists, including Kathleen Kiker, Joachim Moeyens, and Nate Tellis. Each has contributed to the new tools running today including Precovery, which allows users to search a set of catalogs for precovery observations of an object, and our Orbital Elements Transformation, which enables users to convert orbital elements into cartesian, cometary, and keplerian component.

This year we have a generous and exciting first-of-its-kind challenge grant to our organization from Tito’s CHEERS program: they will match donations up to $1 million to help us enable scientific exploration, economic development, and the protection of Earth from asteroid impacts.

And finally, this year marks the beginning of B612’s 20th year of operations. Ten years ago, I joined Ed and Rusty, and over that time, our organization has grown, contracted, and pivoted our strategic direction. Yet this year marks two significant milestones: one, the fruition of our work developing tools that allow us to find aste