Scientists at NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, have submitted an unprecedented set of asteroid detections to the IAU Minor Planet Center, including hundreds of distant worlds beyond Neptune and 33 previously unknown near-Earth asteroids. In this podcast, Dr. Mario Juric discusses how these asteroids were discovered and what we can look forward to in the future from the Rubin Observatory.

Bios:

Rob Sparks is in the Communications, Education and Engagement group at NSF's NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona.

Prof. Mario Juric is the P.I. of UW's contribution to the construction of the Rubin Observatory, Senior Fellow at UW's eScience Institute, and director emeritus of UW's Institute for Data-intensive Astrophysics and Cosmology (DiRAC). Once fully operational in 2026, the Rubin Observatory will deliver the largest sky survey in the history of mankind, answering questions from the nature of Dark Energy to discovering potential "killer" asteroids. Prof. Juric led the definition of Rubin data products and oversees the solar system team.

Prof. Juric received his PhD in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Hubble Fellow at Harvard University. His research is in the area of data-intensive survey astronomy and AI. He developed a range of astronomical software products and techniques, including software for asteroid detection, mapping the Milky Way, novel astronomical databases, and cloud-based astronomical data analysis systems.

Prof. Juric discovered what was at the time the largest known structure in the Universe (the Sloan Great Wall; with J. Richard Gott), a dwarf galaxy colliding with the Milky Way (the Virgo Overdensity; with Z. Ivezic), and over a hundred asteroids (including 22899 Alconrad, the smallest known main-belt binary asteroid; with Korado Korlevic). A Jupiter-family comet 183P/Korlevic-Juric is named after him.

Links:

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