Weekly Space Buzz vol2

Howdy Friend!

In this week’s Weekly Space Buzz, we will cover some news about the useful and not-so-useful items orbiting either Earth or its, rather spacious, neighbourhood.

Finland can into space!

Iceye - a Finnish satellite company, just raised $93 million in growth funding. If you think that’s a lot, consider the fact that the company has already raised a total of $438 million. Yep, $438 million. To put it into perspective, with current pricing around the world, you could live off that money in London, Stockholm, or New York for maybe even three weeks if you’re lucky. That’s about as much as Joe Lacob and Peter Guber paid for the Golden State Warriors in 2010.

What do you need that much money for, you may ask? Well, you’re going to need that and perhaps more if you, like Rafal Modrzewski, Iceye’s CEO, want to build a whole constellation of SAR satellites and create an extensive portfolio of data and subscription products. What kind of products? Any that require global insights, really—flood or wildfire insights are already hot topics. Becoming the global source of truth in Earth Observation is a humble but justified goal.

The company is backed by both the domestic and international community, showing general trust in the company’s vision. With over 30 satellites launched since 2018, offices around the world, and a talented team, Iceye's future sure is exciting.

What can men do against such reckless… rocks?

Rocks. Wait, what? Yep. Rocks. Around 27,500 asteroids, technically rocks, were identified by a team of Asteroid Hunters. Accepting the fact that this is probably the coolest sentence I just wrote, let's jump into the details.

Said Asteroid Hunters (it’s just too cool not to write it again, sorry), which includes researchers at the University of Washington, claim to have identified 27,500 new, high-confidence asteroid discovery candidates. The catch here is that this ancient space rubble was not discovered by making fresh observations of the night sky amidst the sound of crickets, but by grinding through archives of astronomical data of cosmic proportions.

This is where we jump into the world of fancy acronyms, and I’ll let you guess which ones I authored and which ones are legit.

The search took several weeks and was conducted by the Asteroid Institute of the nonprofit organization called the B615 Foundation, in partnership with UW’s DiRAC Institute and Google Cloud. Both institutes developed THOR, an open source software that runs on a cloud-based, also open source platform known as ADAM. If you’re into snakes, go ahead and read the Python code to figure out what it does. If you don’t find snakes too cute, what THOR and ADAM do is analyze the positions of millions of moving points of light observed in the sky over a certain period of time to then link those points together in consistent ways with orbital paths.

To make the matter even nerdier, Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO collaborated with the Asteroid Institute to fine-tune its algorithms for Google Cloud, which is not open-sourced. THOR and ADAM happily analyzed over 5.4 billion observations drawn from NOIRLab Source Catalog Data Release 2—NOIRLABSCDR2 for short.

The majority of the thousands of asteroid discovery candidates are in the main belt, between Mars and Jupiter, but there are also more than 100 apparent near-Earth asteroids.

The Asteroid Institute’s long-term goal is to create a system capable of flagging any potentially threatening near-Earth object before they approach our planet, giving us plenty of time to role-play characters from 'Don’t Look Up' by Adam McKay. Confirming the detections can be a hectic task, but the institute is exploring the use of Google’s AI tools to streamline the process and pour fear into the hearts of those who are already scared of computers.

If you want to read more, just give GeekWire a read.

That’s a lot of debris flying around the planet.

Some of that debris is actually pretty useful. Iceye satellites give us more observability and thus understanding of weather phenomena, deepening our knowledge about our own planet. Meanwhile, the ASTEROID HUNTERS (I had to, sorry) are looking outward, searching for potential threats, but also reusing a lot of the data already acquired, propelling meaningful use of AI further while ensuring we won’t make the same mistakes the dinosaurs made. At least we’ll try to prepare for potential asteroid-themed threats.

Let's just hope none of those asteroids will hit Iceye satellites; that would’ve been a waste, huh?

That is all for this week. I’ll see you next one! Cheers!

Kuba