Experts Are Figuring Out How to Save the Earth from Asteroids
Ever since that giant asteroid exploded over Russia "with the force of 40 Hiroshima atom bombs," experts have been taking those flying space rocks extremely seriously. Their main goal? To figure out how to stop an asteroid from destroying the Earth. Not that it will happen, but it could! So we are thankful world leaders and scientists are thinking things through.
The United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space might sound like something from a movie, but it's a real group of experts who are working hard to make sure an asteroid never kills us all. The group has proposed something called the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), which will analyze data from asteroids like the one over Russia, and then send warnings about threats to various world leaders. Think about the IAWN as a very complex, much more vital tornado warning system that the nation's meteorologists use.
Should an asteroid hit the Earth, the UN's Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG) will have plenty to say about it. This group has been attempting to lay out a plan for not only the strategy for trying to stop an asteroid, but the aftermath of a hit, should they be unable to stop it. As you might imagine, figuring all of this out involves a heap of red tape.
"Defining criteria on when to start thinking about a possible deflection mission is one of the points," Detlef Koschny, the European Space Agency's NEO [Near Earth Object] segment manager in the Netherlands, told Space.com. "This is not easy." Koschny, who is a member of the SMPAG, explained that damage to the Earth, number of people impacted, and plenty more items must be considered. "But these things are hard to know," added Koschny. "They depend on the composition of the object, which often is not known, and needs very precise orbit computations. These are things we have started addressing."
Helping the UN teams is research from the University of Tennessee. Experts there have figured out that asteroids are held together not by gravity, as previously thought, but by its own spinning force. "We found that 1950 DA is rotating faster than the breakup limit for its density,” Ben Rozitis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tennessee, told Time. “So if just gravity were holding this rubble pile together, as is generally assumed, it would fly apart. Therefore, interparticle cohesive forces must be holding it together." Now that scientists know how an asteroid sticks together, it should be easier to blow them apart.
It's good that we have all of these things working together to protect us from asteroids. It's one less thing to think about. Which is great, because...what about aliens?
[Image via Flickr - Swet187]
