International Asteroid Day: From astroinformatics to space mining

Today we celebrate a rather peculiar day: International Asteroid Day. There are not a few of us who come across images of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and his amazing companions going extinct or that of Bruce Willis or Leonardo DiCaprio trying to save the planet (successfully or unsuccessfully) or even Han Solo and Chewbacca escaping from the imperial troops by hiding in them .

By: Carlos Jerez Hanckes, executive director (i) Data Observatory Foundation and academic Faculty of Engineering and Sciences UAI.-Thus, nothing seems more strange than celebrating these wandering bodies as if we were missing dangers and threats to identify. However, asteroids, although they can effectively cause great cataclysms, also play an incredible role, which is to bring materials and especially news from beyond, news that we can receive from Chile in a privileged way.

The Data Observatory Foundation, a key initiative of the National Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation Policy, through the ALeRCE project, became a participant in the global capacities associated with the asteroid warning and terrestrial monitoring system (ATLAS). ), a project co-financed by NASA together with other institutions.

Thus, thanks to advanced artificial intelligence and data engineering techniques, it is possible for the first time to process large images from different telescopes located in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa, to observe the sky every night and generate alerts and reports on the movement of the stars. asteroids.

The foregoing is undoubtedly another relevant milestone in our country in world astronomy, this time not only thanks to our geography, but also to the opportunity to take advantage of the interaction of multiple disciplines such as data science, statistics and engineering at the service of The humanity.

But perhaps this is not the only source of national pride around asteroids. Given its richness in special metals or rare earths such as iridium, palladium or nickel, among others, more and more space companies and agencies are looking with real interest at the possibility of extracting these materials from asteroids and not so much from Earth.

Along these lines, during 2019 the Japanese mission Hayabusa 2 demonstrated that it is possible to land on an asteroid and extract samples from it. And although there are still many technological developments to imagine an economically profitable productive activity, the growing needs of society together with the obligation to care for the Earth, make it not unimaginable that in the not too distant future, space mining will be a reality. , in which Chile, a country with a mining heart, hopefully participates. For now, we already have a very ambitious space program that we hope also includes that look.