Written in SCIENCE he
When watching movies about space, aliens, or fights in which the protagonists travel through a rain of asteroids You may have a question about how likely it would be for one of these rocky bodies to collide with our planet.
At Heraldo Binario we have also been curious so we started to investigate the topic and found something very interesting in The Gazette from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
According to the article, there are several objects that circulate near the Land or other planets, which have been called NEO, (Near Earth Object, for its acronym in English). These are usually comets and asteroids, trapped by the attraction of the Sun or the planets.
However, a collision of a asteroid with Earth in the next 100 years, warned Mauricio Reyes Ruiz, researcher at the Astronomy Institute (IA) of UNAM in Ensenada, Baja California.
He added that “there are objects nearby, but not in collision orbit with our planet (…) the asteroid impacts that we observe and many that we do not see in outer space, of this type of collisions with the Land, They are something that happens and will continue to happen.
Reyes Ruiz clarified that the probability of impact is one kilometer every 8 x 105 years; of more than 300 meters every 20 thousand years and 50 meters every 400 years.
What is done to prevent
According to the expert, what we have to ask ourselves is not whether it is possible or how likely it is that it will happen, but what are we doing?
“On the one hand, astronomers are dedicated to studying these objects with telescopes, understanding them, knowing what they are made of, how they move, if their orbit changes. But on the other hand, some countries, in preparation for the possible discovery of an object that is eminently going to collide with the Earth, they have begun to prepare with missions like DART,” he explained.
DART is a module containing a tracker, a camera to search for the object, communication antennas and solar power arrays. “It measures 1.5 meters and weighs 500 kilograms without the solar panels,” she explained.
The DART launch was carried out to test its Planetary Defense Plan, which aims to prevent the impacts of large asteroids against the Earth.
The university scientists considered that the mission of the POT on September 26 was a success, as DART managed to collide and modify the trajectory of the asteroid Didymus, 160 meters in diameter.
For their part, the university astronomers detailed that, from the National Astronomical Observatory (OAN) of San Pedro Mártir, in Baja California, they also observe the NEOs and carry out the TAOS-II astronomical project, which consists of observing beyond the orbit of Neptune.
This is an international collaboration with Taiwan and will be responsible for measuring the size distribution of small objects to understand the mechanism by which an object is disturbed towards a cometary orbit.