Earth is ill-prepared for an asteroid impact – even though we had 14 years of advance warning, an official report shows

By William On Jun 24, 2024

Getting wiped out by a huge space rock hitting Earth at thousands of miles per hour is one of the ways humanity could become extinct.

Worryingly, a new report shows that we are not prepared for such an event, even though we discovered the object fourteen years in advance.

The official document, published by NASA and the US government, says asteroid disaster management plans “are not defined.”

There is also a “limited willingness” to conduct space missions that could reduce the dangers of an asteroid – as in the film “Armageddon” starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.

In the 1998 blockbuster film, NASA sends a group of drillers to blow up an asteroid on Earth and save humanity.

According to NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, on average every 5,000 years, Earth is struck by a rock the size of a football field and by a civilization-ending asteroid.

Billy Bob Thornton as Dan Truman, a scientist at NASA, in Armageddon. Although it is a series of science fiction films, the deflection of asteroids on their way to Earth is a real concern

The report was written as part of the fifth Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise, a simulation event organized by NASA and the US government.

Although there are “no known significant threats of asteroid impacts in the near future,” the biennial event assesses the ability of top experts to prepare for such an impact.

“The process for making decisions about space missions in an asteroid threat scenario remains unclear,” says the report say.

“The process is not adequately defined both in the US and internationally,” it added.

During the exercise, the experts considered possible national and global responses to a hypothetical scenario in which a never-before-detected asteroid had a 72 percent chance of hitting Earth in about 14 years.

Representatives from NASA, FEMA and the planetary defense community participate in the 5th Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise to assess the ability to respond effectively to the threat of a potentially dangerous space rock

Do you know your asteroids from your meteorites?

A asteroid is a large chunk of rock left over from collisions in the early solar system. Most are located between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Belt.

a comet is a rock covered with ice, methane and other compounds. Their orbits take them much further outside our solar system.

a meteor is a flash of light in the atmosphere when debris burns.

This debris itself is known as a meteoroid. If one of these meteoroids reaches Earth, it’s a meteorite.

As part of the hypothetical scenario, it was not possible to accurately determine the asteroid’s size, composition and long-term trajectory.

But models indicated the asteroid could devastate an area on a regional to national scale if it made an impact.

To complicate matters further, vital follow-up observations would have to be delayed for at least seven months – a critical loss of time – while the asteroid passed behind the sun as seen from Earth.

“The uncertainties in these initial conditions for the exercise allowed participants to consider a particularly challenging set of conditions,” said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer emeritus at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

“A major asteroid impact may be the only natural disaster that humanity has the technology to predict years in advance and take action to prevent.”

Unfortunately, the exercise revealed that ‘decision-making processes and risk tolerance’ are poorly understood among civil servants.

Worryingly, “no contingency management plans for asteroid impact have been defined” and that “timely global coordination” to raise awareness about such a space rock needs more attention, the findings suggest.

In ‘Armageddon’ (1998), NASA sends a group of drillers to blow up an Earth-bound asteroid and save humanity

Obviously, these types of exercises are an essential part of preparing for the unlikely event of a space rock impact, similar to that of the space rock the one who wiped out the dinosaurs.

According to NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, on average every 5,000 years, Earth is hit by a rock the size of a football field, and every million years by a civilization-ending asteroid.

NASA has already achieved a hugely important milestone with the DART asteroid deflection mission.

In September 2022, the DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into Dimorphos, an asteroid 7.1 million miles away.

Although this asteroid posed no threat to Earth, the successful mission proved that such a method could influence the trajectory of a space rock – if such action was necessary.

NASA’s first-ever ‘planetary defense’ spacecraft – sent to deflect an asteroid 6.7 million miles (10.8 million kilometers) from Earth – reached its target on Monday, September 26

According to a 2017 study, only asteroids with a diameter of at least 18 meters (nearly 60 feet) are potentially deadly as they make their way to Earth.

The largest known asteroid in the entire solar system, Ceres, has a diameter of over 900 kilometers (more than 3 million feet) – big enough for humans to live on.

Fortunately, the chance of Ceres hitting Earth is small because its orbit is further away, between Mars and Jupiter, and does not intersect with Earth’s orbit.

Unfortunately, there are certain types of space rock that are difficult or impossible to deflect with such a man-made object, a study suggests.

‘Debris pile’ asteroids – like Itokawa some 2.0 million kilometers away – consist of loose boulders and rocks that have clumped together under the influence of gravity, so that much of it is empty space.

Such an asteroid would act as a “space cushion” in that it would absorb all impact energy and continue its trajectory, the study authors claimed.

POSSIBLE METHODS TO ELIMINATE THE THREAT FROM AN ASTEROID

DART is one of several concepts on how to negate the asteroid threat that have been floated over the years.

Multiple bumps

Scientists in California fired projectiles at meteorites to simulate the best methods to change an asteroid’s course so it wouldn’t hit Earth.

According to results so far, an asteroid like Bennu, which is rich in carbon, may need several small bumps to get back on track.

“These results indicate that multiple successive impacts may be required to deflect rather than disrupt asteroids, especially carbonaceous asteroids,” researchers said.

Nuclear weapon

Another idea, known simply as ‘nuke’, involves blowing up a nuclear explosive close to the asteroid.

However, this could create smaller but still potentially dangerous rock fragments that could travel in any direction, possibly towards Earth.

Ion beam deflection

With Ion Beam Deflection, plumes from a space probe’s thrusters would be directed toward the asteroid to gently push on its surface over a large area.

A thruster firing in the opposite direction would be needed to keep the spacecraft at a constant distance from the asteroid.

Gravity tractor

And yet another concept, the gravity tractor, would deflect the asteroid without making physical contact with it, but instead just use the gravitational field to transfer a required momentum.

Professor Colin Snodgrass, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh, said: ‘A few concepts have been proposed, such as a ‘gravity tractor’ to slowly drag an asteroid away rather than pushing it with a kinetic impactor.

“But the kinetic impactor is absolutely the simplest technology to use on the kind of time scale that is likely to be important for this size of asteroid, i.e. years to decades of warning time.”