[여적] Asteroid Defense – Kyunghyang Shinmun

A spacecraft launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for an Earth defense test successfully collided with the asteroid Dimorphus. Capture live video from NASA

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Many modern people don’t have time to see shooting stars in the night sky, but an average of 17 shooting stars are said to fall to earth every day. If you include a small meteorite entering the atmosphere and burning, more celestial bodies will be facing Earth at this time. Some are not as romantic as the meteor that burned over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February 2013. At that time, 110 people were hospitalized due to a meteorite that broke windows with a roar. It is the largest “meteor disaster” humanity has seen since the meteorite that is said to have wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducted an experiment on the 27th by colliding an object with a meteorite that could be facing the Earth. The target was an asteroid ‘Dimorphus’ with a diameter of 160 m, located about 11 million km from Earth. In a video released by NASA, a small spacecraft equipped with a camera was approaching the asteroid and the signal was cut off after sending an image of the asteroid’s surface just before impact. NASA said the spacecraft reached its goal exactly 10 months after launch. It is said that it will take about four years to finally confirm the success of the experiment through the changes in the asteroid’s orbit and the markings on its surface. The asteroid is unlikely to be headed for Earth, but it has been selected as a target for “planetary defense” technology. The principle is the same as for missile defense (MD) technology. “Earth defense is an effort that unites the world as it affects all life on Earth,” said NASA.

For those of you familiar with Hollywood movies themselves, you might be thinking, “You mean you don’t have this skill level?” However, it seems clear that this science fiction imagination is driving scientific and technological research in a specific direction. It is also necessary to conduct such research. The question is how seriously should we take the possibility of the destruction of the Earth by meteorites. With the development of telescope technology, only more than 10,000 objects of a certain size or larger have been identified that could fall to Earth, and the number is steadily increasing. But there will always be so many such celestial bodies. Most people do not feel the threat of human existence due to meteorites. If the earth were destroyed, wouldn’t that be more likely due to man-made factors like nuclear weapons or the climate crisis?

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