Trajectory Service from Asteroid Institute Empowers Mission Planners and Public Researchers

SAN FRANCISCO, July 22, 2025 /CNW/ -- The Asteroid Institute, a program of B612 Foundation, today announced the launch of ADAM::Trajectory. This new service, running on Google Cloud, allows users to calculate trajectories and propulsion requirements between any two objects in the solar system, including planets, asteroids and artificial satellites. This public-facing service is the first of planned future cloud services that aim to provide navigational capabilities for space, essentially a first step to a suite of services that will enable "turn by turn directions" to locations in our solar system.

Mission planners, students, and others can utilize ADAM::Trajectory to explore launch options through interactive "porkchop" plots and 4D previews. ADAM::Trajectory is available here. The release follows the Institute's recent introduction of ADAM::Impact Probability, a service for assessing asteroid impact risk.

"We're excited to continue our partnership with the Asteroid Institute, expanding the scale, capabilities, and availability of space mapping platforms like ADAM. By combining our products—including Firebase, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Google Cloud Storage—with open data and code, complex solutions such as trajectory analysis are now truly accessible to all. This empowers scientists and engineers everywhere with the tools to easily characterize the complex and dynamic trajectory of any solar system object, profoundly impacting our ability to protect our planet and safely explore our corner of the galaxy," said Will Grannis, CTO, Google Cloud.

Key Capabilities of ADAM::Trajectory

The ADAM::Trajectory online trajectory service offers several important features made possible by the compute infrastructure of Google Cloud:

• Standardized Calculations: ADAM::Trajectory provides a consistent method for astrodynamic computations. By using open-source integrators, transparent code, and industry-standard coordinate systems and constants, it helps ensure that all users get reliable and verifiable results. This approach helps reduce discrepancies that can arise from using various proprietary tools and assumptions.
• Simple Data Integration: The service automates the process of incorporating celestial body data, including sources such as JPL Horizons, Small Bodies Database, SPICE kernels, and NEOCC. Additionally, the ephemeris for the departure, arrival bodies and the solution trajectories are made available in OEM format as well as machine precise parquet files.
• Built with Open-Source: Software developers have access to all the underlying technology to generate the results, available on Github, PyPI and conda-forge. Interested users can build their own custom solutions or verify the accuracy of the results.
• Collaborative: Results can be easily shared as links for discussion and review, whether they are mission planners sharing launch windows with clients or teachers sharing solutions with their students.

Benefits for Space Professionals

The new ADAM::Trajectory service provides advantages for a wide range of space professionals:

• Time and Cost Savings: Mission planners can save many hours and resources previously spent on setting up software, manually integrating data, and resolving computational differences. This allows teams to focus more on core mission analysis.
• Improved Collaboration: Teams can work together more effectively, using the same tool for trajectory data generation and verification. This promotes better collaboration both internally and with international partners.
• Broader Participation: The service enables countries with emerging space programs, universities, and independent researchers to engage in space mission planning, including planetary defense, without needing extensive infrastructure.
• Increased Efficiency: By streamlining trajectory analysis, organizations can more quickly assess mission options, evaluate propulsion systems, and make informed decisions, which can help accelerate space exploration.
• Wide Applicability: Professionals involved in planning or supporting interplanetary missions, whether to asteroids or Mars, will find ADAM::Trajectory useful for understanding mission windows and delta-V requirements.

"This service is a very useful utility for mission planners at all levels in the space community. For years, this kind of trajectory analysis has been a bottleneck, with different groups often using their own custom solutions," says Mike Loucks, CEO of Space Exploration Engineering. "ADAM::Trajectory changes that. It standardizes our capabilities, reduces setup and debugging time, and makes high-precision trajectory planning accessible. Our customers can now explore mission opportunities themselves, and our team is less reliant on a few individuals for this critical work. This will save us significant time and money and improve our approach to mission design."

Other ADAM Services

This launch follows the Asteroid Institute's recent release of ADAM::Impact Probability, a new service for projecting and visualizing impact risk of individual Near-Earth asteroids. The demo allows users to independently calculate impact probabilities for objects on risk lists published by JPL and ESA. It also supports follow-up on newly detected but unconfirmed risk objects flagged by JPL's Scout system. The Institute plans to support user-submitted orbits for custom analysis in the future.

Additionally, the Asteroid Institute offers the ADAM::Precovery, a hosted version of its open-source precovery service backed by multiple catalogs. This service enables users to search for previously undetected observations of celestial bodies in archival data, significantly refining their orbital paths. ADAM::Precovery, ADAM::Trajectory and ADAM::Impact Probability are available for public and scientific use.

"With ADAM::Trajectory and ADAM::Impact Probability running on Google Cloud we can provide services that can run at scale which will contribute to how space missions are planned and how asteroid risks are understood," said Dr. Ed Lu, Executive Director of the Asteroid Institute, a program of B612 Foundation.

About B612 Foundation: A United States based nonprofit, founded in 2002, develops tools and technologies to understand, map, and navigate our solar system and protect our planet from asteroid impacts through its Asteroid Institute program and supporting educational programs, including Asteroid Day and the Schweickart Prize. Founding Circle and Asteroid Circle members and individual donors from 46 countries support the work financially. For more information, visit B612foundation.org or follow on social: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or Bluesky.

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SOURCE B612 Foundation