Earlier this month, researchers announced they found the smallest asteroids ever detected within the main belt, which is a field between Mars and Jupiter where millions of asteroids orbit. With this discovery, scientists say they can now identify and track asteroids that are likely to approach Earth more accurately and efficiently.
"We now have a way of spotting these small asteroids when they are much farther away, so we can do more precise orbital tracking, which is key for planetary defense," Artem Burdanov, the study's lead-author and research scientist at MIT, said in a statement.
Researchers have now located more than 100 new "decameter" asteroids, asteroids tens of meters in size, in the main asteroid belt, according to a paper published in Nature. These "decameter" asteroids are more likely to escape the main asteroid belt and plunge into the Earth's atmosphere.
Richard Binzel, research co-author and MIT professor of planetary science, said astronomers usually alert the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge of any detected objects approaching Earth.
"Once those observations are at [the center], everyone can see those observations... and try to identify if the object will collide with Earth and where it will happen," Binzel said in an interview last week.
Until now, the smallest asteroids astronomers have been able to detect are around one kilometer, which is 1000 meters, researchers said. With this breakthrough, astronomers can now spot asteroids as small as 10 meters.
"This is a totally new, unexplored space we are entering, thanks to modern technologies," Burdanov said in a statement.
The study's lead astronomers used data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and "recycled" an image processing technique originally used to search for exoplanets to search for asteroids, researchers said.
"JWST has been observing the sky with extreme precision to do exoplanetary science, which is what we usually do, but it just so happens that we can use its unparalleled data to find the smallest asteroid in the main belt ever," Julien de Wit, research co-author and MIT professor of planetary science, said in an interview Thursday.
De Wit referenced the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk in 2013, stating that it had only been spotted a mere 12 hours before it collided with Earth's atmosphere. This is the asteroid that prompted NASA to form a Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) in 2016.
Now, with the researchers' discoveries, astronomers can detect decameter asteroids much further in advance.