Over a period of six weeks in the summer of 2021, a team of two other researchers and I tracked the asteroid 2003 HB6. We wrote code in Python which implemented the Method of Gauss to calculate this asteroid's orbital elements and orbital ellipse. At the end of the program, our results were published by the IAU Minor Planets Center.

During our process, we used a Monte Carlo simulation to determine the future path of 2003 HB6. We calculated that in the next 50 million years, there is a 2% probability of the asteroid impacting Earth.

In order to find 2003 HB6 in space, we used known right ascension (RA) and declination (DEC) values of where the asteroid was predicted to be to aim our telescope. We captured a series of long exposure images, seen in the image above, which we used to find our quickly moving asteroid among the stars. 

We stacked our images to reduce camera noise and plate solved so that we could calculate the location of the asteroid using known reference stars. Once we had the position of the asteroid compared to the reference stars, we could calculate the exact right ascension and declination that our asteroid was observed at a given point in time.

We wrote code in Python to determine the orbital elements of the asteroid using the Method of Gauss. The process for doing this is detailed in our orbit determination report. 

Using the orbital elements determined from the code, I created another program that plotted the path of 2003 HB6 alongside the Earth and the Sun. 

This visualization shows that the asteroid passes close to the Sun during part of its orbit and is then launched into a larger orbit due to the gravitational pull of the Sun.

We used 600,000 iterations of a Monte Carlo simulation to calculate the uncertainty of our individual orbital elements. We were also able to determine and graph the standard deviation of the mean (SDOM) using data acquired from a computer-generated ephemeris. 

This comparison told us that our calculated orbital elements agreed were similar to those predicted by the computer. The variation from the mean was expected because of the chance that the orbit of the asteroid was affected by the gravitational pulls of other objects since the last time it was calibrated.

Using the observed orbital elements that we calculated, we were able to find possible outcomes for our asteroid over the course of millions of years. 

By introducing chaos into the orbit of the asteroid (changing a decimal place) we were able to see how drastically a small interference could change the course of our asteroid. 

With 18 different alterations to the data, we discovered that in one of these simulations the asteroid collided with the Earth and in another, the asteroid collided with Venus.