What Happens If an Asteroid Hits Earth?

Harianjogja.com, JAKARTA – With NASA’s DART asteroid deflection mission about to launch, the question arises what would happen if the asteroid did hit Earth.

Fortunately, NASA did not find an asteroid threat threatening Earth during its decades of searching. But just in case, they always have a backup plan (or several), as NASA program scientist Kelly Fast points out in a new video.

Fast, program manager for NASA’s near-Earth object observation program, is part of the agency’s Office of Planetary Defense Coordination. He and his team work with various telescopes to scan the sky and help to figure out problems and impacts in various scenarios.

“It’s important to find asteroids before they find us. Asteroid collisions are the only natural disaster that can be prevented. And NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination office supports projects to find asteroids and calculate their orbits far into the future.” he said quoted from Space.com.

Fast also talked about the upcoming launch of the Dual Asteroid Diversion Test (DART), which is scheduled to depart on November 23. The spacecraft will eventually hit a smaller asteroid orbiting a larger asteroid to see if its maneuver will change direction. Measurements in the moon’s orbit will be made to see if its path shifts, in partnership with the European Space Agency’s spacecraft.

The ultimate goal of this mission is to test the potential of asteroid diversion technology if any asteroid is on a threatening path to Earth.

NASA also has a variety of other missions, to study asteroids and comets (not to mention a series of international missions, some of which have taken samples along the way.) The study is not only about asteroid diversion but also about trying to figure out how these tiny objects fit together. with the evolution of the solar system.

On October 16, NASA launched the Lucy mission to study a Trojan asteroid in Jupiter’s orbit. NASA’s Psyche mission will launch in 2022 to study metallic asteroids up close. Then in 2023, we’ll see some dust grains land on Earth from the asteroid Bennu, via the OSIRIS-REx (Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer) asteroid sample return mission.

A major victory for asteroid science came earlier this year, when new measurements of the potentially threatening asteroid Apophis determined it wasn’t going to hit us any time in the near future. All asteroids and comets known to have orbits are published publicly on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website and the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center website, among other entities.

For those of you who love the world of the solar system, there will also be a film about an asteroid disaster coming to Netflix titled “Don’t Look Up,” which will be released this December.

Source: JIBI/Bisnis Indonesia

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