An asteroid crashing into Earth is one of the humanity’s greatest fears. Scientists from different areas, with astronomers, astrophysicists and engineers at the head develop plans to avoid the terrible fate they had, according to theories, dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
There are great advances by science with the project NASA DART. A space probe was crashed into a small asteroid and managed to divert (a little) its course. However, much remains to be done.
In outer space there are thousands of rocks (really dangerous ones) transiting and there is little chance that any of them will hit our planet. But in case one comes at this time, unfortunately we are not prepared.
those were the conclusions of a recent exercise conducted by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. They proposed a scenario in which a 70-meter space rock crashed into the town of Winston-Salem, a city in North Carolinain the United States and there was no way to stop it.
Monday is the big day: NASA’s first planetary defense mission.
A mission will deliberately crash a space probe into an asteroid as an exercise in future threats to the planet pic.twitter.com/JWbmoCTMho
— Federico Kukso (@fedkukso) September 24, 2022
Some 200 people from 16 different federal, state and local organizations participated in the exercise, the fourth to be carried out in this style, the portal reported. Scientific American. The hypothetical space rock affected a radius of 12 kilometers from the North American town, due to its energy of 10 megatons of TNT.
Are we really not ready?
According to what the exercise showed, no. But, the idea of this practice was precisely that nobody could solve this hypothetical eventuality. That is to say, they were almost warned that with the rock on top and the scientists did not have the recent tools that NASA is testing available.
“We designed it to fill the gap in our capabilities. There was nothing the participants could do to avoid the impact,” said Emma Rainey, a senior scientist at the Winston-Salem Applied Physics Laboratory who helped create the simulation.
“We want to see how effective the operations and communications are between the US government agencies and the other organizations that would be involved, and then identify the gaps,” said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters.
So, with this last statement they make it clear that the exercise, although it did not prevent the impact, was successful in showing the flaws and thus correcting them for a possible future threat.