Far out cosmology: not prepared to stop an asteroid (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, November 04, 2022, 21:05 (532 days ago) @ David Turell

Based on a recent exercise and not including the recent asteroid deflection:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-asteroid-threat-practice-drill-shows-we...

"The exercise was a simulation where academics, scientists and government officials gathered to practice how the United States would respond to a real planet-threatening asteroid. Held February 23–24, participants were both virtual and in-person, hailing from Washington D.C., the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) campus in Laurel, Md., Raleigh and Winston-Salem, N.C. The exercise included more than 200 participants from 16 different federal, state and local organizations. On August 5, the final report came out, and the message was stark: humanity is not yet ready to meet this threat.

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"All in all, the exercise demonstrated that the United States doesn’t have the capability to intercept small, fast-moving asteroids, and our ability to see them is limited. Even if we could intercept space rocks, we may not be able to deflect one away from Earth, and using a nuclear weapon to destroy one is risky and filled with international legal issues. The trial also showed that misinformation—lies and false rumors spreading among the public—could drastically hamper the official effort. “Misinformation is not going away,” says Angela Stickle, a senior research scientist at APL who helped design and facilitate the exercise. “We put it into the simulation because we wanted feedback on how to counteract it and take action if it was malicious.”

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"Blasting an asteroid in space may result in a cluster of smaller but still-dangerous, fast-moving rocks. And an upper-atmosphere detonation of a nuclear weapon has unknown but most likely dangerous effects. The explosion may not fully disintegrate the rock, forcing portions of it down somewhere else. Radiation could persist in the upper atmosphere at levels making traveling through it on your way to space prohibitive.

"With no way to stop the asteroid from hitting Earth, the exercise was all about mitigation—what must be done leading up to the impact and in the immediate aftermath. Organizations at all levels needed to be in contact, emergency plans had to be developed and enacted, and the public informed."

Comment: even if the current abilities are nowhere near perfect, at least we recognize the deficiencies. The 10/14 entry about deflecting an asteroid was just a start.