Avoiding Armageddon: The United States Reveals Plans to Counter Asteroid Killers

The US government has released a new report detailing some of the ongoing efforts to prepare for and respond to a disaster caused by a "near Earth object" (NEO), an asteroid or comet that impacts the Earth. The report contains several strategies that the government could take to avoid such a collision, which could cause immense damage.

Such an impact is highly improbable, given the vastness of space and the relatively small size of near-Earth objects in our solar system. "Fortunately, this type of destructive event is extremely rare," Aaron Miles, a White House official, told Bloomberg.

The report divides the NEO into five general categories by the potential for impact devastation, ranging from "none" (the shooting stars we see in the sky all the time) to "global" (the event that led to the end of the dinosaurs).

Even relatively small objects can cause considerable damage because they travel at such a speed. In 1908, for example, an object about 150 feet wide exploded above Tunguska, Russia, razing more than 800 square miles of forest. The report estimates that such an event on New York would result in millions of casualties.

Fortunately, we get a lot better at tracking the most dangerous objects. In collaboration with the International Asteroid Alert Network and the United Nations, NASA has documented 96% of the world's largest "killer planets," according to Lindley Johnson, a planetary defense officer for NASA. The agency currently has some 18,310 Named Executive Officers, including 8,000 in the "Global" category.

On the other hand, there is a chance that a rogue object may suddenly appear from the interstellar space, giving us only a few months to prepare. That was the case of "Oumuamua", a strange cigar-shaped asteroid that apparently was only a visitor who quickly sailed into our solar system, nearly sunk 200,000 km / h and left.

The report encourages the preliminary planning and design of three different "NEO Diversion" missions:

• Kinetic impact: Just crush a spaceship into the asteroid to sufficiently deflect its trajectory, especially if the object was to years of impact.
• Gravity tractor: Landing and tying a heavy spacecraft on the object would have an effect similar to that of a barnacle on the hull of a ship, altering the path due to the increase in mass.
• Nuclear explosion: Although, obviously, the tactic that Bruce Willis would approve, the reality is more nuanced. A nuclear explosion would reduce the mass of the object, allowing its path to be changed more easily by other methods. The report emphasizes that no nuclear explosive test in the space is planned or necessary, and that such a scenario would only be considered for a bulky object dating back more than ten years.

In the short term, the administration wants to increase funding for missions like NASA's double-asteroid reallocation test (DART), which will test some of these theories by crushing a spacecraft into the orbital moonlet. A double asteroid.