NEW YORK, Nov 21 (Reuters) -- International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) said on Wednesday it sold the U.S. Air Force a supercomputer to help it to identify unidentified flying objects.

The Air Force's Space Surveillance Team, based in Maui, Hawaii, will use the supercomputer to hunt outer space for old satellites, foreign spacecraft, and other UFOs that may be hurtling toward Earth, IBM said.

The IBM system will be used to detect and identify some 9000 objects currently flying around in Earth's orbit. The computer can process 480 billion calculations per second -- making it about 40 times faster than the IBM "Deep Blue" supercomputer that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

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The new supercomputer was part of a $10 million system upgrade, IBM said.