There are killer asteroids everywhere. NASA knows what to do

The Russian incident was a warning. On a winter morning in 2013, a meteor the size of a four-story building deafened the entire country, exploding near the city of Chelyabinsk, injuring more than 1,600 people, as well as widespread property damage.

The 18-meter-wide chunk of rock and iron was a fiery reminder that Earth, bombarded daily by tons of space debris, periodically encounters large planet killers, and a significant portion of them remain undocumented.

After years of study and discussion, NASA launched its first attempt to spare Earth the kind of calamity that extinguished the dinosaurs. He will crash a spaceship into an asteroid to alter its speed and course. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) took off on November 23 aboard a SpaceX spacecraft from California and will navigate for 10 months to a binary asteroid system.

The idea is that if humans have enough time to react – it is preferable to count on decades in advance – enough energy can be transferred to an accelerated rock to alter its trajectory and prevent it from impacting the Earth, thus preventing a catastrophe that could come to have an extinction level (although it’s a popular topic in science fiction, it’s worth noting that NASA’s current toolkit of asteroid destruction techniques does not include Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, or nuclear weapons).

Given the critical nature of the work, “It is no exaggeration to suggest that DART may be one of the most important missions ever undertaken by NASA.”Wrote Casey Dreier, an analyst at The Planetary Society, in a November memo to members.

“This test is to demonstrate that this technology is mature enough to be ready if a real asteroid impact threat is detected.“, said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer of the NASA, at a press conference on November 4.

In September of next year, if all goes according to plan, the ship DART It will target Dimorphos, the smaller 161-meter rock body gravitationally bound to the larger Didymos, which is almost 792 meters wide. The two rocks travel approximately 1 kilometer apart, and Dimorphos orbits its older brother every 11 hours and 55 minutes, “like clockworkJohnson said.

The spacecraft, traveling at approximately 15,000 miles per hour, weighing 610 kilograms and measuring 19 meters across, will collide head-on with Dimorphos to slow the rock down in a fraction of a second and adjust its orbital period around the largest asteroid in several minutes.

DART it will use laser targeting and other high-resolution technologies to autonomously choose its point of impact. As it hurtles toward the rock, the ship’s camera will send images back to Earth. A small satellite-cube released from the main spacecraft before impact will also record images from a safe distance. A big unknown is the composition of the surface and the topography of the smallest body, which are too small to determine from Earth.

The Chelyabinsk incident of 2013 caused Washington to take notice and react, with funding for planetary defense increasing from more than 4,000% to $ 200 million annually over the past decade, thanks to broad support from the Obama and Obama administrations. Trump, Dreier said.

However, the challenges in spotting these would-be planet killers are daunting. Ground-based telescopes have a limited range, objects approaching from the direction of the sun cannot be seen, many asteroids reflect almost zero light, and they all travel at exorbitant speeds – 69,000 kph, or 19 kilometers per second, on average.

The NASA he plans to conduct further tests of his trajectory alteration techniques once he has data from the DART destruction at Dimorphos, assuming the mission is successful.