What would happen if an asteroid were about to crash into our planet?
With NASA’s DART asteroid deflection mission about to be launched and a new movie asteroid disaster movie coming to Netflix, this issue is hot in many people’s minds. Now a NASA scientist has considered what the agency would do if there really was an asteroid colliding with Earth.
Fortunately, NASA has not found any imminent asteroid threats to Earth during its many decades of searching. But for safety’s sake, the agency always has a backup plan (or more), as NASA program scientist Kelly Fast says in a new video.
For those who want to have fun thinking about “what if”, Netflix’s fictional astronaut movie, “Don’t Look Up”, will be released this December.
Related: Potentially dangerous asteroids (pictures)
Fast, the host of NASA’s near-Earth object observation program, is part of the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The office, with a mandate to study these threats from Congress, is working on a series of partner telescopes to scan the sky and help identify logistical conditions in impact scenarios.
“It’s important to find asteroids before they find us, if we are to have them before they get us,” Fast says in the video. “An asteroid impact is the only natural disaster that could be prevented. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office supports projects to detect asteroids and calculate their orbits well into the future.”
Related: The biggest asteroid encounters ever!
Fast also spoke about the upcoming launch of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which is scheduled to depart on November 23rd. The spacecraft will eventually bump into a small asteroid orbiting a larger asteroid to see if the maneuver will change its course so that it orbits closer. Measurements on the lunar orbit will be made to see if the path changed, in collaboration with a spacecraft from the European Space Agency.
The ultimate goal of this mission is to test potential asteroid-redirecting technologies in the event that a small space rock was on a threatening path to Earth.
NASA also has a number of other missions, past and present, to study asteroids and comets (not to mention the package of international missions, some of which have collected samples along the way). These studies are not only about asteroid routing, but also about trying to figure out how these little bodies fit into the evolution of the solar system.
On October 16, NASA launched the Lucy mission to study the Trojan asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit. NASA’s Psyche mission will start in 2022 to study a metal asteroid up close. So in 2023, we should see some dust grains land on Earth from the asteroid Bennu via the asteroid test-return mission OSIRIS-REx (Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer).
A major victory for asteroid science came earlier this year when new measurements of the potentially threatening asteroid Apophis determined that it would not hit us anyway at any time in the near future. All known asteroids and comets have their orbits published publicly on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website and the website of the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center, among other entities.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.