Science A NASA simulation revealed that 6 months' warning isn't enough to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth. "We'd need 5 to 10 years."

[tom_mai78101]

Last month, experts from NASA and other space agencies around the world faced a troubling hypothetical scenario: A mysterious asteroid had just been discovered 35 million miles away, and it was heading for Earth. The space rock was expected to hit in six months.

The situation was fictional, part of a week-long exercise that simulated an incoming asteroid in order to help US and international experts practice how to respond to such a situation.

The simulation taught the group a difficult lesson: If an Earth-bound asteroid were spotted with that little warning, there's nothing anyone could do to keep it from hitting the planet. The experts determined that no existing technologies could stop the asteroid from striking, given the scenario's six-month window. There isn't a spacecraft capable of destroying an asteroid or pushing it off its path that could get off the ground and fly to the rock in that amount of time.

Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, helped host the recent simulation, as well as five previous ones like it. He said this exercise set the participants up for failure.

A NASA simulation revealed that 6 months' warning isn't enough to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth. We'd need 5 to 10 years.

In a recent NASA simulation, scientists had six months to stop a hypothetical asteroid from hitting Earth, and they failed. That wasn't enough time.

www.businessinsider.com

 

[Ghan]

I don't really think anyone would be surprised by this. There hasn't been a serious effort to create an anti-asteroid defense system of any kind, despite the various movies that have explored the subject. The reality is that the delta-V requirements to alter an asteroid's course enough to miss the planet would be insanely high if it were only 6 months out. Maybe once SpaceX's Starship is fully operational then something like that would be feasible, assuming you could come up with some way to actually impart the needed change in velocity to a giant rock. Right now our best defense is predicting orbits and finding dangerous objects with a huge lead time. This gives us more options because you don't need to change the orbit as much in order to have the change be large enough years in the future so that the object would miss us.