NASA Kinda Sorta Has A Plan To Stop Asteroids Heading For Earth, It Just Has To Find Them First

If the movies are anything to go by, the human race is on a time limit. We¡¯re at risk of extinction in a number of ways, from a worldwide pandemic, to nuclear wars, to sentient AI, you name it. But one threat in particular NASA is attempting to tackle is one that killed our former landlords the dinosaurs.

You see, NASA has busied itself with identifying and monitoring as many ¡°killer¡± asteroids as it can. These are hunks of rock that are large enough and on the right course so that they might eventually hit our planet and cause unspeakable damage. The problem here is that the US space agency doesn¡¯t believe it¡¯ll be able to spot all these risk asteroids until 2020, or even 2033. And, unfortunately, for any chance of sending out a spacecraft to intercept such a destructive asteroid in space, we¡¯d need a ten-year head start.

Thankfully, there¡¯s at least some good news here. NASA is certainly taking this threat seriously, and it has at least a semblance of a plan in the works. ¡°If a real threat does arise, we are prepared to pull together the information about what options might work and provide that information to decision-makers,¡± Lindley Johnson, NASA¡¯s Planetary Defence Officer, told a press briefing this week.

The event was scheduled as a sort of update, with NASA having taken an existing strategy document prepared during the Obama administration in 2016 and converted it into more concrete short-term goals. It includes objectives for various sectors of the government; things like working on technology to better track asteroids, ways to predict how they behave in the vacuum of space, conceiving a plan to shatter them if necessary, and ways to carry out such an operation in coordination with international partners.

No doubt asteroid impacts are quite rare, but they¡¯re deadly nonetheless. One less than 30 metres across injured a thousand people when it impacted in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013. Meanwhile, NASA is attempting to track down larger rocks, more than 140 metres across, a boulder big enough to destroy entire cities and more if it impacted from the heavens. ¡°We¡¯ve found about 8,000 near-Earth asteroids at least 140 meters across, but two thirds of such objects remain to be discovered,¡± Johnson said.

In fact, NASA has already begun running simulations for a spacecraft it calls DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), where they basically knock an asteroid off its course straight for Earth. In the meantime though, we really have to figure out a way to detect asteroids early enough that we could even use it.