Developed by a team at the University of Washington, the algorithm is designed to analyse data taken from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (pictured), which is still under construction in Chile.

The observatory is set to undertake a 10-year survey of the night sky, during which the algorithm will be used extensively.

Its first discovery is a roughly 180m-long asteroid, designated 2022 SF289, which was revealed during a test drive of the algorithm with the ATLAS survey in Hawaii.

Finding 2022 SF289, which poses no risk to Earth for the foreseeable future, confirms that the next-generation algorithm, known as HelioLinc3D, can identify near-Earth asteroids with fewer and more dispersed observations than current methods require.

“By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” said Rubin scientist Ari Heinze...