What if a killer asteroid headed for Earth? NASA plans to discover this week

Think of it as an intensive course to avoid asteroid accidents.

As part of the 2019 Global Defense Conference, NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and their international partners will hold a tabletop exercise to show how they would react to the discovery of a fictional asteroid heading toward us. .

The exercise is being conducted as part of a federal "plan of action" for the defense of the Earth against asteroids announced last June. It will run over the five days of the conference, which will begin in College Park, Maryland, until Monday, May 3. You can watch it live in the player below.

"Exercises such as this one have been organized at several conferences over the years, as well as by government agencies," Andrew Rivkin, a world astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told NBC. in Laurel, Maryland, and asteroid expert. MACH news in an email. "It's really worth it, if only people are aware of the problems and the complexity of some of them."

Rivkin, who said he was participating in the exercise, compared the operation to a fire drill, but added that the consequences of a major strike were noticeable. Asteroids "could be very serious (just ask the dinosaurs)," referring to the impact of a six-mile impact. Broad asteroid that would have caused the disappearance of dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.

According to the vaguely written scenario, astronomers discover that a fake rock nicknamed PDC 2019 has a 1 in 100 chance of crashing on Earth in 2027. Participants in the exercise, including the l? European Space Agency and the International Asteroid Warning Network, along with NASA and FEMA, will examine how they could organize space missions to investigate and possibly hijack the asteroid – and how to mitigate the effects of an impact.

Even though PDC 2019 is fictitious, the threat of asteroid strikes is all too real. By early 2019, more than 19,000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) had been discovered – and another 30 are being discovered weekly as astronomers continue to search for them.

"We have found that about one-third of NEOs are big enough to cause significant regional damage, so we still have a lot of work to do," said Amy Mainzer, an astronomer and asteroid expert at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the United States. NASA in Pasadena, California. says in an email. "In my opinion, we need to build and use more high-performance space and ground telescopes," she added.

Until now, experts have not identified any large object during a collision with the Earth.

"We are convinced that the research has found something big enough to be a global problem," Rivkin said in an email. "Space agencies around the world are working together to carry out research programs to ensure neighborhood safety, and NASA is planning a mission called DART [for Double Asteroid Redirection Test] practice the deviation of an asteroid in case we need it. We do not plan to do it anytime in the foreseeable future, but it's good to be prepared! "

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