NASA's Next-Generation Asteroid Impact Monitoring System Just Got Switched On - ScienceAlert

When it comes to avoiding asteroid-inflicted apocalypse, we'll take all the help we can get, and NASA's next-generation asteroid impact monitoring system, which has just been activated, has us sleeping a little bit easier in our beds.

"The first version of Sentry was a very capable system that was in operation for almost 20 years," says automation engineer Javier Roa Vicens, now with SpaceX's Starlink, who led the development of Sentry-II at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Whereas the original Sentry would look at evenly spaced points along the region of uncertainty and then analyze each one in more depth based on certain trajectory assumptions, Sentry-II uses thousands of random points along the region of uncertainty, without any assumptions about which are more likely to be hit than others.

While the astrophysics is quite complex, it essentially means Sentry-II has less of a bias about which points in the potential orbit the asteroid might pass – potentially catching edge case scenarios that Sentry might miss.

"In terms of numbers, the special cases we'd find were a very tiny fraction of all the NEAs that we'd calculate impact probabilities for," says Roa Vicens.

"But we are going to discover many more of these special cases when NASA's planned NEO Surveyor mission and the Vera C.