The most famous asteroid ever is the one that hit Earth 65 million years ago. It is believed that the asteroid threw so much moisture and dust into the atmosphere that it cut off sunlight, lowering temperatures worldwide and causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Maybe the latest events and near misses have people thinking about asteroids and the Earth’s vulnerability, because I read in yesterday’s paper that after the asteroid explosion over Russia, a United Nations panel took up — again — how to keep a far more damaging space rock from hitting Earth. Apparently this is suddenly an urgent topic for the UN. The panel met last week in Vienna and according to the article, is finally close to endorsing a plan for countries to share asteroid warnings and prepare realistic mission designs to deflect a rogue object. The Science and Technical Subcommittee’s Near-Earth Object Working Group and its expert panel, Action Team 14, have been debating the details of an international approach since 2001.
Now I don’t know about you, but if the Earth is about to be hit by a giant asteroid, I’m not sure the United Nations is the first place I’d look for help. Right after the asteroid broke apart over Russia, I found some information about work being done at the University of California and California Polytechnic to create an asteroid defense system using lasers. One of the scientists working on the system said, “All the components of this system pretty much exist today. Maybe not quite at the scale that we’d need — scaling up would the the challenge — but the basic elements are all there and ready to go. We just need to put them into a larger system to be effective, and once the system is there, it can do many things.” The problem, of course, is that the system is hypothetical and has yet to be created — but it sounds pretty cool.
Scientists have a lot of ideas about how to deal with this asteroid problem, but none of them have really been tested in the real world. Probably the most popular idea is to launch a space craft to actually slam into the asteroid. The thinking is that if you can nudge it just a little bit off course, it probably won’t hit the Earth because just a small change in its orbit will put it in a little different trajectory.
As I think about this, it sounds reasonable — assuming you have everything ready to go. If you have to build a spacecraft, you’d probably need a few years warning that the asteroid was coming. One problem with asteroids is they don’t glow, they’re just these chunks of rock. We can see them because they reflect sunlight, but they’re fairly small and we don’t see them too well until they come close to the sun — and us.
So would we have time to pull this spacecraft collision feat off? On one hand, I think if we discover one too late, there’s little we could do — in fact we might not be able to do anything even with plenty of warning due to filibusters, fiscal cliff, debt limit, and the sequester. But then on the other hand, I think we can build that spacecraft in no time — we just have to put together a diverse team to build it and ensure that it is environmentally friendly. Once the environmental impact study is complete and we’ve sent a scout vehicle on a fly-by of the asteroid to be sure there are no endangered species on it, we’ll be ready to knock that asteroid into another orbit. Good old American ingenuity will save us.
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