NASA’s Upgraded Impact Monitoring System Could Prevent an Asteroid Apocalypse - Gizmodo

A new asteroid impact monitoring system called Sentry-II is powerful, fast, and capable of handling difficult scenarios that continually baffled its predecessor.

NASA JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) has been using the pre-existing monitoring system, called Sentry, to evaluate asteroid impact risks since 2002.

Javier Roa Vicens, a former NASA navigation engineer who now works at SpaceX, said that, in under an hour, Sentry “could reliably get the impact probability for a newly discovered asteroid over the next 100 years—an incredible feat,” as he explained in a NASA press release.

That’s impressive, no doubt, but the time has come for an upgrade, and with all due respect to Sentry, the newly deployed system, appropriately called Sentry-II, is damned impressive.

Simply put, Sentry-II, with its new-fangled impact monitoring software, is better at evaluating these uncertainties, and is thus superior at evaluating threats posed by near Earth objects, or NEOs.