The world is facing a giant asteroid. A bit alarmist? Maybe, but those plans have a pretty high mortality rate.
Scientists at NASA have signed an agreement with China, Japan and India to come up with a “partner plan” to deal with an incoming asteroid with the potential to wipe out humanity.
One way to deflect an asteroid away from Earth is to deflect it back into space by using a nuclear device. But NASA has never had a goal to defuse or deflect an asteroid. Instead, the agency has spent years working to detect and track asteroids and learn how to deflect them. To this end, the agency’s Near-Earth Object program has made three planetary-class discoveries in 2018, that includes the largest asteroid discovered in 2018, named “Ohda.” If scientists detect an asteroid with the potential to pose a risk to humanity, they contact the asteroid’s orbit and begin working on a plan.
The agreement signed Monday by NASA, India, China and Japan was the culmination of talks between the agencies and their experts over the past few years. It’s unclear yet what the asteroid retrieval plan would look like, or which asteroid may be in danger of posing such a threat.
In 2015, three asteroids zipped very close to Earth but missed it by a few dozen years. One asteroid zipped by in February at within 17,000 miles of Earth, and another in September that year, more than 22,000 miles away. These distances are an average of 15 to 100 times wider than the moon.
It’s easy to dismiss these close passes as harmless and think of them as “cosmic backyard fireworks,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told The New York Times. But this year, NASA is already dealing with something far more dangerous to life on Earth — the Salida big one, a potentially catastrophic asteroid that flew past the planet in April.
If scientists detect an asteroid with the potential to pose a risk to humanity, they contact the asteroid’s orbit and begin working on a plan. But the reason our governments banded together is not just to plan for the asteroids that approach, but also to figure out ways to deflect them back into space.
It’s never easy to prevent a planet from potentially destroying itself.
Just ask the people of Tunguska, Russia, a half-million-acre asteroid that exploded in the sky in 1908, killing nearly 1,000 people and injuring thousands more. NASA managed to slow down a big asteroid passing between Earth and the moon that year, but it was unsuccessful in defusing a nearby rock in 1991 — a successful attempt on one failed for a second time in 1998.
Here’s one way the agency is trying to get the ball rolling on an asteroid impact scenario.
Read the full story at The New York Times.
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