Annual Progress Report 2022

This page: Raiatea and Taha’a, French Polynesia by Ed Lu from the ISS

Cover: The Himalayas by Ed Lu from the ISS

The Asteroid Institute, a program of B612, is the international center of excellence for scientific collaboration on the discovery of asteroids as well as an incubator for new technologies. Since 2002, we have 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. This report outlines progress in science and research within the Asteroid Institute and other public education programs at B612.

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

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 (see page 12 for a description of the NASA Double Asteroid Redirect Test mission).

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 Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform as well as the “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery” (THOR) algorithm that made our asteroid discoveries possible. You can read more about THOR and ADAM on page 10.

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 elements. You can learn more about these three team members and their work in this report.

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. Our community of donors has stepped up to the challenge, but, as you will read in the pages that follow, we need your help to fully unlock the challenge gift. Gifts from new donors will be doubled! We hope you will help spread the word so that gifts from supporters in your community and from around the world will be matched by Tito’s.

And finally, this year marks the beginning of B612’s 20th year of operation. 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 asteroids; two, after more than two decades of public advocacy through B612 and Asteroid Day, humanity has witnessed our first test asteroid-deflection mission.

KEN

In the coming years, we are eager to roll out more astrodynamics tools to the wider astronomy community that will further enhance the value of ADAM. You can read about our progress, our tools, and our people in the pages of this report. Thank you for being a member of our crew.

Looking ahead,

Danica Remy President, B612 Foundation Co-Founder, Asteroid Day

What is remarkable is that B612 did not build a new telescope or even make new observations with existing telescopes.

CHANG, THE NEW YORK TIMES

ABOUT US

ASTEROID INSTI TUTE

Asteroid Institute, a program of B612, brings together scientists, researchers, and engineers to develop tools and technologies to understand, map, and navigate our solar system. The Asteroid Institute leverages advances in computer science, instrumentation, and astronomy to find and track asteroids in addition to technologies to enable the economic development of space and enhance our understanding of the evolution of our solar system.

ASTEROID EDUCATION

Since 2002, B612 has supported public advocacy and educational programs, including Asteroid Day and global internship programs. Our work has been carried out entirely through the support of private donors from 46 countries.

What started in 2002 as a visionary idea to develop the technology to deflect an asteroid has grown into a world-renowned organization and scientific institute with a key role in the astronomy community. For years, B612, our partners, and a global community of dedicated scientists and researchers have advocated for increased asteroid detection, and many victories have resulted from those efforts. Asteroid detection is now debated seriously in scientific, governmental, and public conversations.

Asteroid Institute Discovers New Asteroids

Using “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery” (THOR), the Asteroid Institute identified 1241 known asteroids and 113 high-quality discovery candidates in a small slice of a 30-day window of observations. These 113 were submitted, and 104 were confirmed as discoveries by the Minor Planet Center.

Hack-A-Thons

The Asteroid Institute crew met up in Seattle and San Francisco this year to expand and refine THOR and the Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform. These in-person gatherings (for the first time in 2 years) resulted in brain-crunching and algorithmbending, as well as the natural team building that comes along with in-person events.

Launch of $1 Million Challenge Grant

Tito’s CHEERS issued an exciting $1 million matching challenge grant! Throughout human history, exploration has been the key to opening new frontiers. The Asteroid Institute and Tito’s have joined forces to fund computational astronomy to explore and map the next frontier: the solar system.

Precovery

In August, the Asteroid Institute announced the launch of Precovery, a benefit to the entire astronomy community. Procovery, which looks at the observations of an object in images taken before the object was discovered, is available for telescope surveys, amateur astronomy, research, and tracking spacecraft.

In May of 2022, the Minor Planet Center confirmed the discovery of 104 Main Belt asteroids by the Asteroid Institute using the THOR algorithm. The algorithm is not yet configured to find near-Earth asteroids, but it will be in the near future. The green lines show the trajectories of the new asteroids, the blue line is Earth’s orbit, the red lines show the orbits of Venus and Mars, and Mercury and Jupiter are shown in tan.

IN THE LAST YEAR

The ecosystem of science is changing because software now can do things that 20, 30 years ago you would not even dream about, you would not even think about.

ZELJKO IVEZIC, VERA C. RUBIN OBSERVATORY

ASTEROID INSTI TUTE

LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

As I sit down this year to write this letter, something feels fundamentally different than at any point in my 30+ years in the space world. Worldwide development of space capabilities has taken off. Each day we see another story about a new achievement in space, in everything from scientific advances to new technologies to new businesses. This is incredibly exciting, and I think this trend will continue. We are witnessing the beginnings of our development of space throughout the solar system. And as we have stated many times before, we will need a dynamic map of the solar system to enable its development as well as to protect our planet.

Against this backdrop, the pace of progress on our goals has vastly accelerated. Not only has our Asteroid Institute team accomplished more this year than in any previous year, thanks to your support, but the field of planetary defense is about to be transformed. The Vera Rubin Observatory will have first light within about a year, which will multiply our ability to discover and track asteroids by a factor of 10.

In the following pages, you will read about our important milestone of becoming actual asteroid discoverers. Our team, working in partnership with our colleagues at the DIRAC Institute and the University of Washington, unveiled our capabilities to discover asteroids at scale with the novel algorithm called THOR. This algorithm was developed by our collaborator Joachim Moeyens with funding from B612. This exciting development is described on page 10.

On page 13, you can read about our Precovery API, an astrodynamics service running on the Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform. Precovery allows researchers to both confirm and refine potential asteroid discoveries. This work was developed by our growing engineering team and was primarily led by Kathleen Kiker and Nate Tellis. Check out our new public-facing site https://adam.b612.ai/ to access Precovery and our other astrodynamics services.

And finally, on September 26th, NASA demonstrated the first test deflection of an asteroid with the DART mission. This was a historic moment for humanity. You can read more about it on page 12.

The next few years are going to be very exciting!

Dr. Ed Lu Executive Director, Asteroid Institute

Photos pages 4 and 8 by Christopher Michel.

NEAR-EARTH ASTEROID SIZE RANGES 19–44 m 44–140 m 140 m–1 km Over 1 km

Chelyabinsk, 2013 19 m (62 ft) More than 30 A-bombs

Tunguska, 1908 45 m (148 ft)

There are 2.5 million near-Earth asteroids in this size range.

140 m (459 ft) More than 7,000 A-bom bs NASA GOAL 0.1% tracked

There are 500,000 near-Earth asteroids in this size range.

There are 25,000 near-Earth asteroids in this size range.

More than 150,000 A-bombs CIVILIZATION ENDER 1% tracked

ASTEROID DISCOVERY PROGRESS More than 99% of the asteroids large enough to destroy a city (like the Tunguska asteroid) remain untracked. As of October 1, 2022, the Minor Planet Center has 29,999 near-Earth asteroids in its database. This year, 2,175 new NEAs were discovered, largely by Pan-STARRS and Catalina Sky Surveys.

There are 1,000 near-Earth asteroids in this size range. SPACEGUARD SURVEY 1998–2010 (COMPLETED)

30% tracked 93% tracked NEAR-EARTH ASTEROIDS TRACKED

LSST & NEOSM 2008–2030 (EST. COMPLETION)

ASTEROID INSTI TUTE

WE ARE ASTEROID DISCOVERERS

By Joachim Moeyens

After years of planning, gathering for Hackathons, and plenty of software engineering and testing, the Asteroid Institute has launched a cloud-based computational platform. The Asteroid Discovery, Analysis, and Mapping (ADAM) platform is an open-source, scalable engine for running computationally demanding astrodynamics algorithms. By being open-source, the algorithms and code can be easily verified, built upon, and shared with others in the scientific community.

ADAM, which hosts the Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) algorithm, scans catalogs of telescopic observations and links points of light in different images that are consistent with asteroid orbits. The ADAM platform can search multiple catalogs of observations simultaneously, which is compute-intensive but made possible by the Google Cloud Platform. ADAM uses a custom-built framework that uses services such as Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage to enable large-scale discovery searches with THOR. Together these systems make up what we call ADAM::THOR (said “THOR on ADAM”) — a cloud-based asteroid-discovery machine.

The Asteroid Institute announced in May that by using ADAM::THOR to sift through approximately one-eighth of the data from a single month of the NOIRLab Source Catalog (NSC), we were able to identify 1241 known asteroids and 113 high-quality discovery candidates. These 113 were submitted to the Minor Planet Center, and 104 of them were confirmed as discoveries.

The complete NOIRLab Source Catalog (NSC) contains seven years of now years-old data, suggesting that there are many, many thousands of discoveries waiting to be made. Processing the NSC data set is the first step towards being ready to tackle the enormous volume of data that will be produced by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory starting in 2024. Data from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will revolutionize our knowledge of the solar system but only if we have the tools in place to do so. When ADAM::THOR is built out to handle the scale of LSST and extended to the entire population of near-Earth asteroids, imagine what it could achieve in our quest to map our cosmic neighborhood.

Discovering asteroids and mapping the solar system isn’t limited to those who operate telescopes or fly space missions. ADAM shows us that significant and cost-effective advances can be made with compute power and clever software.

NOIRLab Pan-STARRS

CRTS Zwicky

LSST FUTURE DATA SETS

ASTRONOMICAL DATA SETS

FUTURE SERVICES THOR Precovery Orbit Conversions

ADAM

New Asteroid Discoveries

About Joachim

Joachim is an Asteroid Institute Researcher and graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Washington. For his doctoral thesis, Joachim is working on algorithms that discover minor planets in astronomical surveys — in particular, on Rubin Observatory’s Solar System Processing pipelines — and is the lead developer of the Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery (THOR) algorithm.

Existing and future astronomical data sets, like the NOIRLab Source Catalog (NSC) and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)

are analyzed by discovery services, on the ADAM platform, running on Google Cloud

… discovering new asteroids and computing their trajectories.

Images taken by the Luke and Leia cameras on board LICIACube showing Didymos-Dimorphos and the plume of ejected material immediately after impact.

DART MISSION IMPACT

September 26, 2022, 23:14pm GMT

On September 26, humanity took an important step forward in our ability to protect planet Earth from asteroid impacts. The DART probe (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) changed the trajectory of an asteroid, a capability we will one day need when (not if) an asteroid is found to be on a collision course with Earth. B612 has been pushing for such a test since our founding in 2000, and it was gratifying to see this finally happen.

The DART spacecraft rammed into the asteroid Dimorphos at a speed of nearly 14,000 MPH, providing a subtle nudge to the velocity of the asteroid. The principal goal of DART was to both demonstrate the guidance technology of the spacecraft as well as to measure the exact amount of momentum change applied to the asteroid. The fact that it hit means the trajectory of the asteroid was altered, but at the time of print, we are still waiting for this exact measurement. We can however say that the guidance technology worked well.

For many years now we have been saying that the name of the game when it comes to asteroid defense is finding and tracking asteroids. And that if we find one with our name on it with enough notice, we will be able to nudge the asteroid to ensure a miss with Earth. The DART mission provides us with a real-world test of such technology. Our efforts at asteroid discovery and tracking now take on even more importance.

PRECOVERY

By Kathleen Kiker

In August 2022, the Asteroid Institute announced our Precovery API, an astrodynamic service running on the Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform. Precovery looks for observations of an object in images taken before the object was discovered. This adds validation to all discoveries, as any time an object is discovered, its arc can be extended with precovery on ADAM.

From telescope surveys to amateur astronomy, ADAM::Precovery (said “Precovery on ADAM”) can be used for many different research and astronomy purposes. Not only is it a valuable tool to the astronomy community, but by using past data or data that is already available (instead of collecting new data from telescopes for a specific purpose), it has the potential to free up valuable telescope time for other survey goals.

While Precovery is compute-intensive, the ADAM platform running on Google Cloud makes it accessible. Gathering the data for Precovery can also be difficult, but with ADAM::Precovery, multiple databases can be searched at once.

The simplest way of doing Precovery is to propagate the orbit back to all possible times and check the position of the object against all observations. However, running this brute force method would have taken months for the whole dataset. Faced with the task, the Asteroid Institute team developed a new method to dramatically improve the speed of ADAM::Precovery.

In ADAM’s method, the sky is split into healpixels. Observations are grouped by healpixel and time. As the orbit propagates back in time, only the observations in the corresponding healpixels are checked against the orbit. This cuts the time for Precovery by about 10x.

In essence, any time an object is discovered, ADAM::Precovery can help extend its arc. Astronomers, scientists, and the public can try out this service at https://adam.b612.ai/.

About Kathleen

Kathleen (Kat) Kiker is part of the ADAM software engineering team, focusing on orbital determination. Her prior research focused on black-hole formation using Cloudy simulation software. She is skilled in a range of programming, modeling, and graphing tools to solve physics problems. Kat earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in physics from the New College of Florida, and a master’s degree in physics from George Mason University.

PROGRAM EVOLUTION

2012–2013

2016

2018

Open letter sent to NASA about deflection-mission planning and discussions regarding potential impact of asteroid 2011 AG5.

Asteroid Day is recognized by the United Nations and holds 500 events worldwide.

2004–2008

B612 leads the Apophis debate.

B612 founded with goal to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner. 2005

B612 announces invention of gravity tractor in Nature

2008–2009

B612 funds design study at JPL showing feasibility of the gravity tractor.

B612 announces the Sentinel Space Telescope project.

2014–2015

B612 releases asteroid-impact video with data from the Comprehensive Nuclear-TestBan Treaty Organization.

B612 is lead Founding Partner of Asteroid Day, a global asteroid-awareness campaign.

B612’s “Sentinel to Find 500,000 Near-Earth Asteroids” published in IEEE Spectrum

Asteroid Day project holds 150 events worldwide.

B612 funds Caltech research study to validate synthetic tracking feasibility.

B612 begins Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) project.

B612 endorses NEOCam and LSST for 100 m+ solution and stops fundraising for Sentinel project.

2017

Asteroid Institute builds team for ADAM to provide analytical tools for asteroid-defense scenarios.

Asteroid Day moves to Luxembourg and streams a 24-hour global broadcast.

B612 publishes call for shared solar system map in Financial Times

B612 celebrates 15th anniversary.

B612 launches Asteroid Institute program.

Asteroid Institute announces Google and AGI as ADAM technology partners.

Asteroid Institute announces appointment of Research Fellows.

Asteroid Day holds 2,000+ events worldwide, streams a 48-hour global broadcast.

Asteroid Institute publishes synthetic tracking results as a NASA technical report.

2005

Congress gives NASA goal of finding 90 percent of asteroids larger than 140 meters, called the George E. Brown, Jr. NearEarth Object Survey Act.

2006

United Nations ASE NEO Committee initiated.

2012–2013

A 19 m meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring over 1,500 people and damaging thousands of buildings across six cities.

2014–2015

UN Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and General Assembly pass resolution creating International Asteroid Warning Network.

Construction for Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) begins.

2016

NASA announces Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu launches.

2017

Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) almost funded by EU and USA.

DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is funded.

2018

Pew Research poll shows Americans believe asteroid monitoring should be national priority.

United Nations OOSA publishes Planetary Defence Report.

2019

Asteroid Institute research on deflection impulses to move asteroids presented at Planetary Defense Conference.

Asteroid Day celebrates 5th anniversary and streams 21day global broadcast.

ADAM Engineer Funding campaign launched.

2020

Asteroid Institute paper

“Required deflection impulses as a function of time before impact for Earth-impacting asteroids” published in Icarus

Asteroid Institute hosts ADAM hackathons (virtual in 2020).

Asteroid Day goes virtual and broadcasts 30 days of Asteroid Day TV.

ADAM engineering team hired.

2021

ADAM team releases opensource code THOR and is published in the Astronomical Journal

B612 sponsors and presents at virtual Planetary Defense Conference.

B612 sponsors and presents LSST Solar System Science Collaboration Conference.

2022

The New York Times announces news of the first 104 asteroids found by Asteroid Institute using THOR on ADAM.

Asteroid Institute launches two free services on the ADAM platform, Precovery API, and Orbital Elements Transformation.

SYNTHETIC TRACKING ASTEROID DISCOVERY ANALYSIS AND MAPPING (ADAM)

RESEARCH FELLOWS

2019

Hayabusa2 spacecraft surveyed asteroid Ryugu.

Associated Press research shows Americans believe asteroid monitoring should be a national priority.

Hera mission funded.

2020

LSST changes its name to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

COVID-19 quarantines the world, reminding us of the importance of taking the long view.

Hayabusa2 collects asteroid Ryugu samples and heads back to Earth.

OSIRIS-REx collects a sample of asteroid Bennu.

2021

25th Anniversary of NEAR Shoemaker Mission.

Hayabusa2 returns asteroid Ryugu sample to Earth.

Osiris-REx heads back to Earth with asteroid Bennu sample.

2022

The world begins to recover from COVID-19.

DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) probe crashed into an asteroid, testing a method of changing the velocity of an asteroid.

ASTEROID INSTI TUTE

RESEARCHERS & COLLABORATORS

*

Marisa Bradley, Public Communications Manager BS, University of Oregon, Journalism Marisa came aboard in March to help navigate Asteroid Institute’s public communications and events. Previously she worked in marketing & advertising, insurance, and briefly had her own garden-design business.

Nate Tellis, Software Engineer BS, McGill University, Physics + Computer Science Nate joined our crew in April as an Asteroid Institute software engineer developing and scaling ADAM services on the cloud. He spent several years as a staff scientist with the UC Berkeley Department of Astronomy, with a focus on optical SETI programs, primarily the search for unresolved point sources in stellar spectra.

SUMMER INTERNS

Fabio Herpich, Brazil PhD, University of São Paulo, Physics + Astronomy

Eli Lingat, USA BS, University of Washington, Physics + Astronomy

Arjun Naik, USA

Pursuing BS at University of Washington, Computer Science + Engineering

Sherry Yang, China

Pursuing BS at University of Washington, Computer Science + Engineering

*This list does not represent all of the Researchers and Collaborators at the Asteroid Institute.

ADAM, THOR, PRECOVERY & THE ASTRONOMY COMMUNITY

By Rusty Schweickart

There are many bright people in the astronomical community: astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, astrobiologists, and other astro-nerds. While there is great diversity in their specialties, they are all very attentive to one another, and pay particular attention to the tools that enable pioneering work. In recent years, our own Asteroid Institute has created and refined amazing new tools that will impact the entire astronomical community.

The Asteroid Institute’s astrophysicists and engineers have created THOR (Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery), which runs on ADAM (our Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping platform), a revolutionary combo of data mining and analytic tools that will discover tens of thousands of near-Earth asteroids that we didn’t know we’d even seen! These new tools, in combination with Precovery (searching back in time for unrealized earlier asteroid sightings), will search through years of archival data to not only discover previously missed asteroids but also to eliminate prior false impact possibilities and significantly improve the orbits of those we are tracking today.

Astronomers who want to register their asteroid discoveries with the Minor Planet Center (the official clearing house for near-Earth asteroid discoveries) need to submit their data in the form of tracklets. Developing tracklets requires telescopes to revisit the same area of the night sky three or four times in a single night. This requirement is not only tedious but effectively requires the dedicated use of special-purpose search telescopes. By working with Minor Planet Center to accept ADAM::THOR (THOR on ADAM) discoveries, a new flexibility is introduced that enables these special purpose and other research telescopes to dramatically increase their productivity, both in nearEarth asteroid discovery and in sharing the instruments with non-NEA astronomy.

Additionally, in searching for new near-Earth asteroids by processing the huge volumes of already archived astronomical data, the Asteroid Institute team can more effectively prepare for and validate our ADAM::THOR performance in anticipation of that moment in 2024 when live data begins streaming from the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile. When it is up and running, we expect that the Rubin telescope will double the number of known near-Earth asteroids in well under a year.

I want to personally thank our donors for their faith in our work and for their support in enabling the development of these incredibly impactful tools.

ADAM, THOR, PRECOVERY, AND THE ASTRONOMY

The Asteroid Institute has created and refined amazing new tools that will impact the entire astronomical community.

RUSTY SCHWIECKART CO-FOUNDER, B612 FOUNDATION

ASTEROID EDUCATION

ASTEROID

DAY GLOBAL

For the eighth year in a row, B612 is proud to be a global sponsor of Asteroid Day, celebrated annually on June 30th and recognized by the United Nations internationally. The overarching theme of Asteroid Day 2022 was “small is beautiful.” Compared to the planets, the majority of asteroids are indeed small, but, to the eyes of those who study them, those rocky surfaces are beautiful.

From June 28 thru July 2, asteroid experts converged in Luxembourg, in-person for the first time in two years, to share advances in the field. Asteroid Day LIVE, a four-hour program hosted in the state-of-the-art BCE/RTL studios, included interviews and panels featuring astronauts, scientists, and experts in the fields of planetary defense and asteroid detection. Dr. Ed Lu and Dr. Mario Juric (DIRAC and University of Washington) from the Asteroid Institute, joined B612 President Danica Remy for the global broadcast and other Luxembourg activities.

While experts gathered in Luxembourg, the worldwide team of organizers produced their own independent events, from weighing asteroid samples in Brazil to museum presentations in Athens.

• In Nigeria, attendees of the Nigerian Moon Mission Project spent the evening focusing on children’s asteroid education.

• The Instituto Milenio de Astrofisica in Chile brought together folks from observatories, planetariums, and universities to participate in workshops, sky observations, planetarium sessions, and games.

• Perhaps most impressive, the Ukrainian Kharkiv team hosted a series of lectures on asteroids on the university’s Facebook and YouTube pages just days after their city was bombed.

• Meteor Crater, in Arizona, partnered with Lowell Observatory for their independent event. Matt Kent, CEO of Meteor Crater and the Barringer Space Museum, said, “Right here in northern Arizona, we can see the literal impact of asteroids on our planet. What better place to hold an Asteroid Day event than here?”

Astronomy clubs and organizations around the world took the opportunity to educate people about asteroids in their own cultures, in their own personalized way. These organizations help shift the global movement to a local and meaningful conversation. “Small is beautiful” can also be applied to the small but steady impact of Asteroid Day on global asteroid education.

ASTEROID EDUCATION

The Asteroid Education program increases awareness about asteroids and science through public speaking and exposure in the media. In addition to Asteroid Day, this year we shared stories about our work and why the world should learn more about asteroids. We have highlighted a few public education activities from this last year.

Dr. Ed Lu & Joachim Moeyens

THE NEW YORK TIME S

“This is the modern way of doing astronomy,” Ed Lu was quoted in The New York Times, which reported on THOR and our first 104 discoveries, describing how our new technology has changed the way asteroids are discovered.

May

Dr. Ed Lu & Joachim Moeyens

WIRED MAGAZINE

“This is showing the importance of computation in going forward in astronomy,” said Ed Lu in an article in Wired featuring Asteroid Institute’s newest asteroid discoveries and it’s goal to build tools and technologies that will allow us to detect, map, and deflect asteroids.

June

Danica Remy PLANETARY RADIO

Asteroid Day celebrates its 8th year with a host of special guests and events, including The Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio interview with Danica Remy and Detlef Koschny, head of ESA’s Planetary Defence Office.

Dr. Ed Lu SPACE NEWS

The Vera Rubin Observatory “will be the big dog,” Dr. Lu said in the article “Mapping the Sky,” talking about how the Rubin Observatory using THOR will dominate the discovery of asteroids in the upcoming years.

July

Danica Remy POLITICO

Danica Remy advocated that political leaders should invest in a rapid hundred-fold acceleration (100x) of asteroid discovery.

Meteor Crater Expedition 22 WINSLOW, ARIZONA

Asteroid Institute scientists, researchers, and friends visit Meteor Crater to explore the best-preserved meteorite impact site on earth.

October

Joachim Moeyens

NATIONAL SPACE SOCIETY OF NORTH TEXAS PRESENTATION

Joachim Moeyens presented Asteroid Institute’s most recent findings to a full house, discussed ADAM::THOR, and fielded questions from the astronomy community.

ASTEROID INSTI TUTE

TITO’S CHEERS $1 MILLION CHALLENGE GRANT

Throughout human history, exploration has been the key to opening new frontiers. The Asteroid Institute and Tito’s CHEERS have joined forces to fund computational astronomy to explore and map the next frontier: our solar system.

Tito’s Handmade Vodka developed CHEERS (Creating Hope + Elevating Emerging Research + Science) to discover and fund promising research in healthcare, sustainability, and advanced technologies.

Our engineers and scientists at the Asteroid Institute are building the Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping (ADAM) platform, to map our solar system. A comprehensive map of the solar system will allow scientific exploration, economic development, and the protection of our planet from asteroid impacts.

Our global community of donors and citizens are essential for us to build ADAM and continue to be an incubator for new technologies, engage and invest in interns from around the world, and educate the world about asteroids.

Tito’s CHEERS will match gifts this year!

Donations at all levels* are critical for us to recruit skilled engineering talent needed to achieve our software- and technology-development goals. The vast majority of our expenses in the last few years has gone and will continue to go to building the ADAM platform and the services that will run on ADAM. With ADAM and the new services coming online, we will engage more students, scientists, astronomers, and the general public to both build and use the platform. In addition, we will continue to build upon our education and advocacy efforts by staffing a team that brings our message, the problems we are solving, and evangelization for our unique technology to an engaged, cross-disciplinary, international community.

The public’s support of our work is critical this year to advance our work and will generously be doubled by the Tito’s CHEERS challenge.

*All new donor’s gifts will be matched as part of Tito’s CHEERS challenge grant. For existing donors, your gift must be double the size of your smallest gift in any prior year for it to be matched by Tito’s.

FOUNDING CIRCLE

ANONYMOUS x 7

ANONYMOUS LEADERSHIP GIFT*

Bill Anders

Geoffrey Baehr

William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation*

Brian Burton and James Mercer, Broken Bells

Don Carlson

Vinton and Sigrid Cerf

Y(Lmc) and Clark Chapman

Emily and David Corrigan

Asa Denton

Esther Dyson

Alan Eustace

Sasha Galitsky

Eliot Gillum

*Leadership Gift ($1 M–$5 M)

Glaser Progress Foundation

Dane Glasgow

Steve and Julie Grimm

Garrett Gruener and Amy Slater

VK Hsu & Sons Foundation Ltd.

James D. and Justin Jameson

Margaret Jonsson Family Foundation

Steve Jurvetson*

Dominik Kaiser

Steve Krausz

Vladas Lašas

James Leszczenski

David Liddle and Ruthann Quindlen

Suzanna Mak

Greg and Lacey McAdoo

Scott McGregor and Laurie Girand

John Montrym

Matt Mullenweg

Diane Murphy

Peter Norvig

Shervin Pishevar

Peggy Rawls Family Fund

Ray Rothrock

Edwin Sahakian

Rusty Schweickart and Nancy Ramsey

Tim Trueman

Robert C. and Fallon B. Vaughn Matthew and Sarah Welty

Ben Wheeler

Yishan Wong and Kimberly Algeri-Wong Matthew Wyndowe

ASTEROID CIRCLE

Rick Armstrong

Barringer Crater Company

Rodney Brooks Jim Chervenak

Explorers Club

Lynn and Anisya Fritz

Arthur Gleckler and Kristine Kelly

Jensen Huang

Tito’s Handmade Vodka

Pictured at Meteor Crater in Arizona, October 2022: (Front row, left to right) Joyce Lee, Brian Bender, Marisa Bradley, Nate Tellis, Colleen Fiaschetti, Margaret Gould Stewart, David Stewart; (Back row, left to right) Scott McGregor, Laurie Girand, Anna McGregor, Steve Smith, Vladas Lašas, John Eskeland, Dana Griffin, JohnMark Conklin, Dr. Ed Lu, Matt Bradley, Joachim Moeyens, Arthur Gleckler, Sarah Rabie, Alex Popa, Jim Jakubovitz, Stacy Schusterman, Mimi Tarrasch, Julie Mikuta

Not Pictured: Danica Remy & Paul Saffo (photo credit)

Gifts $500–$24,999*

Anonymous Every.org x 3

Anonymous x 8

AGI, In-kind

Jason Amunwa

Amy Andrews & Lawrence Stuemke

Joseph Biernat

Richard Bowen

Joseph Brown

Evan Butler

Erik Charlton

John Clendenin

John Conery

George Cornecelli

Albert Ender

Ray Erikson

We have donors from 46 countries.

Joseph Fischer Bruce Fitzsimmons

Patrick Garvey

Jeff Hungerford

Google Inc., In-kind

Robert Jedicke

Samuel Lichtenstein Ernie McNabb

William Molesworth

Tom Moss

Jonathan Nagin Caolionn O’Connell William O’Donnell

O’Donnell Wieselquist Fund Drummond Pike

Mitchell Portnoy

Dirk Pranke

David Rumsey Rolf Schreiber Randy Schweickart

Dana & Angela Stadler

Richard & Denyse Stawicki Stroum Family Foundation

Eric W. Tilenius

Jan Magne Tjensvold

Hal Varian Al Werner

Lawrence Wilkinson

*From September 1, 2021, to October 1, 2022

Christmas Island Reefs, by Ed Lu from the ISS

GOVERNING BOARD

B612 FOUNDATION

Danica Remy, President

Marisa Bradley, Communications Manager

Joelle Byars, Operations Associate

Dr. Ed Lu, Co-Founder

Danica Remy, President

Lawrence Wilkinson

ASTEROID INSTITUTE, A PROGRAM OF B612

Dr. Ed Lu, Executive Director

Dr. Marc Buie, Mission Scientist

Dr. Scott Hubbard, Mission Strategist

Dr. Harold Reitsema, Mission Director

Jeff Rothermel, Avionics Engineer

Dr. Sam Waldman, Avionics Engineer

ADAM PROJECT TEAM

Aidan Berres, Software Developer

John Carrico, Astrodynamicist

Dr. Siegfried Eggl, Research Collaborator

Hank Grabowski, Engineer and Astrodynamicist

Dr. Sarah Greenstreet, Senior Researcher

Dr. Mario Juric, Research Collaborator

Kathleen Kiker, Software Engineer

Emmie King, Software Engineer

Mike Loucks, Astrodynamicist

Joachim Moeyens, Research Collaborator

Samira Motiwala, Astrodynamicist

Allan Posner, Engineer and Astrodynamicist

Nate Tellis, Software Engineer

Dr. Vivek Vittaldev, Mission Researcher

ASTEROID DAY, A PROGRAM OF B612

Dr. Brian May, Co-Founder, United Kingdom

Danica Remy, Co-Founder, California, USA

Grig Richters, Co-Founder, Germany

Rusty Schweickart, Co-Founder, California, USA

Colleen Fiaschetti

Program Director, Luxembourg

Anna Bordus, Program Manager, Luxembourg

Stuart Clark, Editorial Director, United Kingdom

Saulo Machado, Global Event Coordinator, Brazil

Rhea Abdo, Social Media, France

ADAM INTERNS

Paulo Barrera, University of Denver, USA

Connor Davidge, Lakeside School, Washington, USA

Fabio Herpic, University of São Paulo, Brazil

Eli Lingat, University of Washington, USA

Arjun Naik, University of Washington, USA

Amelia Whitlow, University of Washington, USA

Sherry Yang, University of Washington, China

Peter Schwartz, Chair

Geoffrey Baehr

Dr. Clark Chapman Dr. Dan Durda Garrett Gruener