Officials from NASA and other international organizations recently conducted a simulated test to assess their ability to respond to a hypothetical asteroid that could crash into Earth in 2038.
The tabletop exercise went as planned and was widely considered a success by those involved. However, several media outlets misreported what happened, giving the impression that the impact scenario was real or that we are woefully ill-equipped to deal with it – which is not true.
Between April 2 and 3, nearly 100 experts from more than 25 organizations in the United States and abroad, including NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA ) and the Department of State’s Office of Outer Space Affairs, gathered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, to participate in the Interagency Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise.
This event, which involved team members informally discussing potential responses to a hypothetical asteroid strike, was the fifth and largest such version, following similar meetings in 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2022 , sister site of Live Science. Space.com reported.
“A major asteroid impact is potentially the only natural disaster that humanity has the technology to predict years in advance and take action to prevent,” Lindley Johnsonthe program manager of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, said in a statement. statement about the event. Simulating such a scenario can help give experts the experience needed to deal with such situations and highlight knowledge gaps in current protocols that will need to be filled in the future, he said. added.
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On June 20, key members of the exercise team shared and discussed results of the last simulation in a online press conference. During this event, they also revealed to the public for the first time the hypothetical scenario used in this year’s exercise.
In this new hypothetical scenario, astronomers detect a large asteroid with a 72% chance of hitting Earth in 14 years, on July 12, 2038. We do not yet have detailed information on this fictional asteroid, but its trajectory could place it on a collision course with major cities including Dallas, Washington, Madrid and Algiers, Algeria. Uncertainty over the size of this space rock means any potential impact could kill between 1,000 and 10 million people.
Some media, including India Times And NDTV News, took this scenario out of context during his report on the briefing. They used misleading headlines suggesting that the threat exposed in the exercise was real and that NASA had “issued a warning” about the imminent danger.
Other outlets — including the daily mail And The register — suggested that the exercise showed that we are ill-prepared to deal with this scenario in real life. However, these reports are also inaccurate.
Threat assessment
This year’s tabletop exercise presented a unique and “particularly challenging” scenario to officials gathered in Maryland, Johnson said.
Despite having more time before potential impact than in previous iterations of the exercise, experts had less information than ever about the hypothetical incoming space rock. For example, they were told the width could be between 200 and 2,600 feet (60 to 800 meters). The composition of the asteroid is also unclear, which affects its destructiveness.
To top it off, the scenario involved the asteroid disappearing behind the sun for seven months shortly after its discovery, meaning experts had to make plans without really knowing what was going to happen.
The team considered three options: first, wait until the asteroid reappears for more observations; Second, send a spacecraft to fly by the asteroid and learn more about it; and third, launch a mission to fly next to the space rock, which would maximize the amount of information we could learn about it.
The consensus was to send a spacecraft to learn more about the asteroid rather than wait to see what happens or launch a much more expensive rendezvous mission on short notice. However, officials also expressed concerns about our ability to do so, particularly because of the speed with which such a mission would have to be set up and whether politicians would green-light the funding (until now). ‘to 400 million dollars) without further details on the situation. As a result, 19% of participants said they believed we would not be prepared to plan and implement such a mission in this scenario.
Related: Could scientists stop a ‘planet-killer’ asteroid from hitting Earth?
Some media outlets have taken advantage of this uncertainty, claiming that these potential obstacles could completely disrupt our ability to manage the asteroid. But in reality, most experts believed such a mission was achievable.
Since the tabletop exercise did not simulate anything beyond the initial decision-making phase after the asteroid was discovered, it is also unclear what would have happened afterwards, making impossible to describe the event as a failure, as several media outlets have done.
Are we really ready?
In reality, we have never been in a better position to deal with scenarios like the one in the simulation exercise, NASA officials wrote.
This is due in part to the recent triumph of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully hijacked And changed the shape of the asteroid Dimorphos after crash a spaceship there on September 26, 2022. While not a perfect analogue for stopping a potentially deadly asteroid from hitting Earth (Dimorphos posed no threat to our planet), the test showed for the first time that the technique for deflecting an asteroid called a “kinetic impactor” “This method is a viable way to protect our planet.
NASA also plans to launch the Near-Earth Object Surveyor — a space telescope dedicated to searching for new near-Earth asteroids — by summer 2028. Once in orbit, the telescope will increase our ability to spot dangerous space rocks, including those near the sun’s glare , the researchers wrote.
Continuing tabletop exercises like these will also help improve our preparedness for a possible asteroid strike. For example, approximately 90% of participants in the recent exercise reported that they felt better prepared to tackle the challenges raised during the exercise after it was completed.