b612.ai

What It Is

Asteroid Institute is a project under the B612 Foundation. Its core product, ADAM (Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping), is positioned as an open-source astrodynamics platform for discovering, mapping, and analyzing asteroids at planetary scale. It is not a general-purpose developer tool, but a specialized scientific computing platform for astronomy, space mission planning, and planetary defense.

Core Capabilities

ADAM provides a console and APIs for running high-fidelity computations on demand, sharing results, and reproducing experiments. Its capabilities cover Trajectory Optimizer, Precovery, Impact Probability, and Ephemeris Service. The Trajectory Optimizer supports interactive porkchop plots and Lambert solutions; Precovery can search for unlinked observations in historical survey data from NOIRLab, SkyMapper, ZTF, ATLAS, and others; the impact probability module supports Monte Carlo and virtual impactor analysis; and the ephemeris service generates sky positions, apparent magnitudes, rates of motion, and observability metrics using the ASSIST N-body integrator and SPICE kernels.

Data, API, and Ecosystem

The platform provides exports of observations submitted by Rubin Observatory to the Minor Planet Center, an MPC BigQuery copy, and pip-installable astronomy data packages. Supported data formats include CSV, Parquet, and SQLite, with examples for gsutil, curl, and Python/pandas/sqlite3. On the API/SDK side, the text explicitly mentions console and APIs, as well as the mpcq Python client library. In terms of ecosystem, it collaborates with the University of Washington DIRAC Institute and Google Cloud, and the THOR algorithm also provides a GitHub entry point.

Pricing and Open Source

The text does not specify any paid plans, resource quotas, or SLA. Its work is funded by private donations to the B612 Foundation, and public bucket reads require no authentication. ADAM is explicitly described as an open-source platform, but its license, deployment model, and self-hosting options are not explained.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Its strengths are a complete research workflow, open data, friendly formats, strong reproducibility, and the ability to leverage cloud-based scalable computing. Its weaknesses are its extremely narrow domain focus, limited direct reusability for ordinary development teams, and insufficient information on accounts, API limits, commercial support, and local deployment. It is best suited for astronomy researchers, sky survey projects, NEO risk assessment teams, and space mission designers.

Access from China

The platform depends on ecosystems such as Google Cloud, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and GitHub, so access from mainland China may be unstable or require a proxy. Payment information is not disclosed. Potential alternatives or complementary tools include JPL Horizons, Minor Planet Center, Astropy, and OpenOrb.