Lodestar PAC
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0.64%
267 measured
of 41,884 near-Earth asteroids have a measured composition
// launch-window solver
LAMBERT SOLVE  converged · 6 iters
Δv launch  4.87 km/s
Δv arrive  4.54 km/s
time of flight  220 d
EROS CHECK  6.10 vs Benner 6.11 
 lodestar · characterize

    
// one 1-km metallic asteroid
Platinum-group metals aboard
0
vs all platinum ever mined on Earth
0
Total bulk-metal value
0
86% CONFIDENCE
ML-PREDICTED
every figure carries its provenance and an uncertainty band that widens as confidence drops
Lodestar PAC
Research · Methods & Model Card
Characterizing the asteroids no one has measured: ranking them by value and accessibility, predicting what they are made of, and computing when to launch.
41,884
near-Earth asteroids
82%
ML accuracy (LOO)
1,354
characterized, from 267
6.10
Eros Δv · Benner 6.11
scroll ↓
01 — The gap

Only 267 of 41,884 have a measured composition.

That is 0.64% of the catalog. The overwhelming majority of near-Earth asteroids have never been spectrally characterized, and hand-curation cannot keep pace with the modern flood of discoveries. Scroll, and watch the model close the gap fivefold.

101955 Bennu C
Compositioncarbonaceous · water-rich
Est. value$41.8 B
Δv to rendezvous5.10 km/s
Provenancemeasured
02 — Launch windows

Real trajectories, validated.

A universal-variable Lambert solver and a porkchop sweep find the minimum-Δv launch window for any target. It recovers asteroid Eros's optimal Δv at 6.10 km/s against the published Benner value of 6.11: screening-grade, but genuinely correct.

1620 Geographos S
Compositionstony
Est. value$8.1 T
Δv to rendezvous6.75 km/s
Provenancemeasured
03 — Machine characterization

Predicting composition from reflectivity.

A class-balanced model reads an asteroid's albedo and orbital dynamics and reduces them to a compositional class with a calibrated confidence. It reaches 82% accuracy against a 72% baseline and expands the characterized population fivefold to 1,354, every prediction tagged, never disguised as a measurement.

4179 Toutatis S
Compositionstony · ML-predicted
Est. value$75.7 T
Δv to rendezvous6.59 km/s
Provenanceml-predicted
04 — Value from composition

Worth, built from what's actually there.

A single metallic near-Earth asteroid can hold more platinum-group metal than humanity has ever mined. Value is assembled from recoverable resources, water, iron-nickel, and platinum-group metals, never asserted as a single number, and always carried with an uncertainty band.

6489 Golevka S
Compositionstony
Est. value$71.6 B
Δv to rendezvous6.44 km/s
Provenancemeasured
05 — The fence

Honest by construction.

Every figure is an estimate with explicit uncertainty and a provenance tag: measured, ML-predicted, or assumed. As certainty drops, the band widens, on screen, in the open. Lodestar decides which asteroid to study or visit next and roughly when. It is a screening and decision-support engine, never flight software, and it never claims to be more certain than it is.

4486 Mithra S
Built withJPL SBDB · Asterank
MethodsLambert · random forest
Deploymentstatic · open
06 — Model performance

How well the characterization model actually works.

Every number below is measured by leave-one-out cross-validation on the 116 near-Earth asteroids that have both a measured composition and an albedo. No object is ever scored by a model that has seen it. Where the model is weak, the chart shows it.

Accuracy vs. baseline

leave-one-out · 116 objects
100% MODEL · albedo + dynamics 82% MAJORITY-CLASS BASELINE 72%

Beating the “always guess the commonest class” baseline by 10 points is the bar a real classifier has to clear. This clears it.

Confusion matrix

rows = truth · columns = prediction
PREDICTED C S M C S M 18 11 0 6 77 0 3 1 0

Recall by class: stony 93%, carbonaceous 62%, metallic 0%. Metallic is genuinely unlearnable from albedo alone, so the model is told to flag it as a weak prior, not a finding.

Confidence is calibrated

observed accuracy by confidence band
100 50 0 67% < 0.5 n=12 82% 0.5–0.7 n=60 86% ≥ 0.7 n=44

Higher confidence really does mean higher accuracy. That monotonic climb is what lets a user trust the confidence number instead of treating every guess the same.

What the model leans on

random-forest feature importance
albedo .27 abs. magnitude .16 inclination .13 aphelion .10 semi-major axis .09 perihelion .09 Tisserand .09 eccentricity .07

Albedo carries the most signal: dark carbonaceous rock reflects very differently from bright stony rock, with orbital dynamics filling in the rest. Physically sensible, not a black box.

Coverage expanded fivefold

characterized near-Earth asteroids · measured + predicted
267 measured 1,354 characterized (5.1×) 267 MEASURED 1,087 ML-PREDICTED 1,354 TOTAL

The model adds 1,087 albedo-only objects to the 267 with a measured spectrum. Median prediction confidence is 0.61, with 185 (17%) at 0.70 or higher, and every predicted label is carried separately from measured truth, never blended into it.