Visualization of the Asteroid Skies
Hōkūlele Hula
Hōkūlele means "shooting star" in Hawaiian. Our goal is to produce a visualization of the asteroid impact hazard, emphasizing the long-term threat over the next 100 years.
Like the Hula, a traditional Hawaiian dance narrating the interaction between the native Hawaiians and the Sea, our project aims at providing new ways to tell the story between asteroids (Hōkūlele) and the Earth.
JPL maintains a current list of the most hazardous near-Earth asteroids NEAs at its [Risk Page]:(http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risks/). Instead of the standard approach of visualizing the orbits of these asteroids using a program such as Celestia we wanted to produce a visualization of the immediate threat from all Risk Page asteroids and show a snapshot of the 100-year risk outlook.
Our visualizations are the Impact Globe and the 100-Year Rose Plot. The Impact Globe summarizes total impact threat over a window of several years. We tabulated the impact predictions from the JPL risk page for all objects. Each "needle" on the Impact Globe corresponds to a single asteroid's potential impact within a time window. A needle is given a color code according to the energy of the potential impact (red is catastrophic, blue only a "light scare"), and the length of the needle indicates the likelihood of an impact. The locations of the needles are not meaningful -- they are distributed from all directions regardless of true direction of impact.
The Rose Plot shows the distance of a hazardous asteroid from Earth over the next 100 years, showing the periodic close approaches and potential impacts. For all the Risk Page objects, we obtained orbital elements from the IAU Minor Planet Center and computed positions for all the asteroids every day for 100 years into the future. The Rose Plot shows the distance from Earth for each asteroid over the next 100 years. The dashed lines show the Earth-Moon distance and Geosync satellite altitude. Asteroids whose rose plot extends inside these dashed circles have approaches closer than the moon and geosynchronous satellite altitude, respectively.
The 2015 SpaceApps Challenge coincided with the University of Hawaii's 2015 Open House, so we were able to solicit the input of dozens of attendees who stopped by the 2015 SpaceApps Challenge room at the Open House.
The data are the PHAs from JPL Risk Page and the IAU Minor Planet Center. These objects come closer than 0.05 astronomical units (AU) from Earth and are about 140 meters or larger in diameter. We have extracted: the date, the probability of impact, the distance to the Earth and the Palermo scale that encodes the dangerosity of the asteroid and is related to the energy of the potential impact.
- Impact Globe
- Complete list of Risk Page potential impacts
- CSV
- JSON
- Rose Plots
- List of orbital elements for Risk page asteroids (DES format)
- OpenOrb orbit and ephemeris tool. Extract the MJD/UTC1 and Delta columns from the output.
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Google Chrome Experiments WebGL Globe
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JPL Risk Page
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IAU Minor Planet Center, orbital elements for JPL Risk Page objects
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Institute for Astronomy Open House, April 12, 2015
- Phyllis Podolske
- Allan Stone
- Sierra Beaton
- The Baldus & Lawrence 'Ohana
- Connor and Debbie Frey
- Melody Wolk, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
- Istvan Svapudi, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
- Wu Po Feng, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
- Larry Denneau, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
- Curt Dodds, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
- Andrei Sherstyuk, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
- Robert Jedicke, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
- Serge Chastel, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii