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A strip of red dots indicates the "risk corridor" for a hypothetical asteroid strike, which is part of an exercise organized by planetary defense experts under which they analyze data relating to a fictional asteroid this week.
Landsat / Copernicus / Google Earth / Departmental Geographer
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Landsat / Copernicus / Google Earth / Departmental Geographer
A strip of red dots indicates the "risk corridor" for a hypothetical asteroid strike, which is part of an exercise organized by planetary defense experts under which they analyze data relating to a fictional asteroid this week.
Landsat / Copernicus / Google Earth / Departmental Geographer
The giant asteroid is in a horrible orbit and has a 1% chance of reaching Earth in just eight years. And, thank God, it does not really exist.
This is a fictional asteroid that is the subject of a realistic exercise designed for scientists and engineers around the world participating in the 2019 Global Defense Conference to be held this week outside of Washington , DC.
A real asteroid of this size, should it touch the planet, could annihilate an entire city.
"It's a threat that could occur, even if it's extremely unlikely," says Paul Chodas, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near-Earth Objects. who created this realistic simulation. "Our goal here is to review all the steps we should follow."
He says he has learned a lot from three previous exercises held at previous international conferences and other asteroid exercises that had been conducted separately by officials from NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
This time, the alleged asteroid has a width of about 300 to 1,000 feet and has been spotted at about 35 million kilometers. What is known about its false trajectory indicates that it has a 1% chance of reaching our planet in 2027.
On the imaginary PDC's "Asteroid 2019" web page, NASA warns that it "does not describe a real potential impact on asteroids".
Chodas deliberately designed this pretext to threaten the international decision-making system. Every day at this conference in College Park, Maryland, experts will meet to discuss new information that Chodas provides them from his prepared script.
"The asteroid is not at all in a proper orbit," he says. "It's not like one of those asteroids that we're seeing in our science missions, where you have to pick a nice, easy-to-reach asteroid." In planetary defense, the asteroid chooses you.
And although eight years may seem like enough time to prepare, Chodas says the timing is ambitious, as experts would like to complete several missions on the so-called asteroid to gather information.
"You do not even really know if it will touch the Earth, and yet, as the schedule is tight, you have to start preparations to study the asteroid," he says. "You do not really know the size, and size is a key parameter, so you must first conduct reconnaissance missions.
Asteroid experts will need to decide how to deflect the asteroid by pushing it with a spaceship or even blowing up a nuclear weapon. If these efforts fail and they are still heading towards Earth, emergency officials should consider a massive evacuation of the strike zone.
In real life, asteroid hunters have discovered almost all the very large space rocks likely to cause a devastating global disaster, explains Chodas.
"This part of the danger has been addressed," he says. "We have discovered almost all the very big asteroids."
But asteroids that are the size of the fake in this exercise are more numerous, he says. They also hit Earth more frequently (even though there are still tens of thousands of years between impacts).
"The majority of this population" smaller asteroids, says Chodas, "has not been found yet".
Last year, the federal government released an action plan outlining actions to be taken over the next decade to better prepare for this type of threat with low probability and serious consequences.
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