NASA simulates a potentially catastrophic impact on its asteroid this week

Anyone who has followed the European Space Agency's Twitter account over the past week may have been scared when the organization started tweeting about a "huge asteroid" that should land on our planet. planet in 2027.

The good news is that it will not really happen.

ESA is one of many agencies and space organizations involved in a simulated scenario of what would happen if humans made discover a huge asteroid moving towards us. It's an exercise that NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and others do every year to determine how the world should respond to such a terrifying event. It is coordinated by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Objects, which is hosting a conference this week on asteroids and global defense.

"We are trying to ask what we would do," said Paul Chodas, head of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Near-Earth Objects Research Center. The edge. "We try to make a realistic simulation, ask the following questions: what would we know when? From the moment it was discovered, to everything that will happen later. "

This year, the simulated situation is disastrous. The story begins in March when scientists discover an asteroid close to the Earth with an estimated width of between 330 and 1000 feet. The asteroid, called PDC 2019, is expected to go through the Earth on May 13 at a safety distance of 12 million miles. But after following the trajectory of the PDC in 2019 for a few weeks, fictitious scientists first determined that the asteroid would rock back to Earth in 2027. When it does, the rock will have 1% of chances to be projected on the planet.

One percent may not seem very high, but for the global scientific community, experts need only take note. Generally, Earth-like asteroids of this size do not reach such a high percentage of the planet. "One percent is a threshold from which we will take it very seriously and look at our options," said Chodas.

But then things get worse. The simulation progresses rapidly until July 2019, after scientists have been able to observe the 2019 PDC for a few more months. This gives them a better idea of ​​the size and the path of the asteroid. In the simulation, the width of the asteroid is reduced to a distance of between 460 and 850 feet. Today, the 2019 PDC has a 10% chance of reaching Earth in 2027.

Image: NASA

In this exercise, real scientists like Chodas claim to use tools that would be the first warning sign of an imminent impact on the asteroid. The imagined 2019 PDC is discovered through the Pan-STARRS telescope, an observatory based in Hawaii. It is one of NASA's most important asteroid tracking instruments, along with the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. A telescope in the space known as NEOWISE also helped the catalog of the space agency to catalog many asteroids orbiting the Earth. The spacecraft is also used to "track" the 2019 PDC in the simulation.

In fact, NASA has discovered about 20,000 asteroids in orbit near the Earth, of which about 900 have a width greater than 0.6 kilometers or a kilometer. If an asteroid of this size were to crash into our planet, it could trigger global climate change. The simulated asteroid is not this large, so that it would not cause a global catastrophe. But if something like that hits the Earth, it will cause major damage. The asteroid could release 100 to 800 megatons of energy, decimating much of the planet. This is enough to prompt NASA to take drastic action.

Each day of the exercise, NASA provides an update of the scenario, advancing the simulation over time. The second update yesterday afternoon pushed the timetable for a few months, but Chodas said some updates would move the years ahead, after significant progress. "We are going to go forward for a number of years, then the problem will evolve as we get more information, we will learn more about the asteroid, and we will learn that it poses a greater threat to the Earth, "he says.

While all this is happening, ESA and other organizations involved in the simulation are providing updates on Twitter, some of which have scared some casual social media users. ESA has included the #fictionalevent hashtag in all tweets related to the event, but some Twitter users have been a little scared. "Wait, is it real? Is it happening ??! ESA responded by confirming it was not real but adding that it was "very plausible".

Meanwhile, members of NASA, FEMA, ESA and others will discuss seriously how to tackle this fake asteroid. It helps organizations determine how to disseminate this information to politicians and the public in the event of a real asteroid threat and to develop and evaluate emergency response plans.

One option is to create a spacecraft that can get to the asteroid and force it in, changing the speed and direction of the object so that it misses the Earth. "That would be enough to make the Earth miss, if it were done in the years to come," says Chodas. NASA is already working on a real mission that would test this process in the space. It's called DART (Double Asteroid Redirect Mission) and will sneak into a small asteroid moon, an object orbiting another asteroid. It is supposed to be launched in 2022.

Fortunately, no asteroid is currently worrying scientists like PDC 2019. However, a similarly sized asteroid, Apophis, scared scientists in 2004 when it was discovered. At that time, scientists thought that the Earth would have a 2.7% chance of reaching Earth in 2029. Apophis ranging in width from 690 to 1080 feet would cause significant regional damage if it occurred. Fortunately, after other observations of the asteroid, the likelihood of this happening is greatly reduced. Apophis will still pass less than 30,000 km from the Earth on Friday, July 13, 2029, within the reach of some of our remote telecommunication and surveillance satellites. This overview will give scientists the opportunity to observe the asteroid from Earth and possibly to distinguish its surface features.

In the end, there is currently no major threat to asteroids facing Earth. That's why simulation of an object like the 2019 PDC offers scientists of the planet an experience of how they react to reality. For now, remember that tweets about an asteroid crash in 2027 are just a test of Earth's emergency space organizations.