Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

I’ve written about the risk posed by the potential impact of a Near Earth Object on this planet several times within these Space Sunday articles. While they are rare, as we’ve seen with the Tunguska event of 1908, and the more recent  2013 Chelyabinsk air-blast and 2018 LA (ZLAF9B2) in June 2018, objects of a size sufficient enough to survive their initial entry into the Earth’s atmosphere before being ripped apart in a violent explosion can and do exist.

Nor is Earth alone in the threat – as witnessed by those observing the lunar eclipse of January 21st, 2019, the Moon can be hit as well. At 04:41 GMT, during the period of totality during that eclipse, numerous astronomers in North and South America and in Western Europe saw a sudden bright flash lasted less than 1/3 of a second. It was later attributed to an object around 30 to 60 centimetres (1 to 2 ft) across striking the Moon at around 61,000 km/h, producing a new crater somewhere between 10 and 15 metres (32 to 49 ft) across.

While the majority of the 10+ million objects thus far found crossing Earth’s orbit as they go around the Sun pose no real threat to us (in fact, the number of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, or PHAs, has been put at just 2,000), and the risk of a substantial impact occurring in anyone’s individual lifetime is relatively remote, the fact is that – as Douglas Adams famously noted – space is big really big. Even the solar system is a vast place when compared to the size of Earth, big enough to hide any number of objects that might one day pose a very real threat to all life on Earth or, given humanity’s global distribution the potential to place one of our major cities at risk.

So how might we deal with such an eventuality? Currently, there are really only three practical options available to us – although others have been suggested, and more might be developed in the future. Which of them might be used depends on how much lead time we have in which to take action. To summarise:

• The gravity tug: if the impact is decades away, a spacecraft with a motor such as an electric ion drive could rendezvous with the asteroid and enter a halo orbit around it. The motor could then be fired along the axis of flight, allowing the gravitational influence of the vehicle to “pull” the asteroid onto a new course. However, this option can really only be used if the inclination of the threatening asteroid is relatively close to that of Earth’s; if the two are very disparate, the time needed to get the spacecraft to the asteroid using gravity assist manoeuvres around the Earth or Venus or even Jupiter, might simply be too long.

• The Kinetic intercept: this uses brute force to deflect the asteroid by slamming relatively solid masses into to, their momentum serving to shunt it into a slightly altered orbit around the Sun that is sufficient for it to miss the Earth.
• Nuclear deflection: similar to the kinetic intercept, but uses the shock waves of nuclear weapons detonated close to the asteroid to again shunt it into an altered orbit so it misses the Earth.

The major problem with the last two is the risk that if the asteroid is too fragile, rather than shunting it aside, they could shatter it, leaving Earth facing not s single object, but a scatter gun of debris, potentially with multiple elements large enough to devastate large areas of the planet’s surface should they enter the atmosphere and explosively disintegrate. This is also the reason why trying to directly blow an asteroid part using a nuclear strike isn’t regarded too favourably. There are other issues with each of these options that could also limit their effectiveness, or raise the need to repeat them, but they provide a general idea of how we might react.

Hence why the International Academy of Astronautics holds a Planetary Defence Conference every two years to discuss the latest findings with NEO and PHAs, and the ways and means to prevent such an impact – or at least the loss of life minimised. Since 2013, the 5-day conference has included a special “war game” type simulation to examine how a threat might be dealt with, and at the 2019 conference, held between April 29th and May 3rd, the simulation with publicly disseminated via social media as it progressed, to encourage grater public understanding about the need to better locate and track NEOs and PHAs (which are currently being discovered at the rate of around 700 a year).

In this simulation, which compressed an 8-year time frame into 5 days, the 200 astronomers, engineers, scientists and politicians at the conference were informed a large (fictional) asteroid around 300 metres across would slam into Colorado in 2027, unless then managed to divert it. Initially, things went well: a joint mission involving the USA, Russia, Europe, China and Japan used kinetic impacts to safely divert the bulk of the asteroid away from Earth. However, a 60m fragment broke away on a course that would see it hit the Earth’s atmosphere at 69,000 km/h (43,000 mph) and explode 15 km (9.3 mi) above Central Park, New York City. The force f the air blast would be sufficient to complete raze Manhattan and parts of New York City for a radius of 15 km (9.4 mi),  with the  effects of the blast felt up to 68 km (42.5 mi) from the epicentre. Plans were drawn up to try to deflect this fragment using a nuclear blast, but these became mired in political wrangling (not for the first time in these simulations)  until it was too late to achieve the desire deflection.

While such exercises might sound like scientists playing games, they do serve a purpose in that they help to underline the massive threat we face if we discover an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth – and the need for us to have better means to detect objects that might pose a threat early enough that we can take action, and also to better understand the processes – technical, scientific and political – that need to followed / overcome in order to prevent a collision.

They also highlight other issues as well. In this case, just how do you handle evacuating a city of 8 million souls? How much time is required (in the simulation, it came down to just 2 months)? What are the logistics required to ensure a (relatively) smooth evacuation? How and when should you tell the public? How do you avoid mass panic? This type of discussion is actually of major import, given current thinking is that if an object due to strike the Earth is 60 metres or less across, the focus should be on evacuating the area directly affected, rather than on trying to deflect it.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: asteroid impacts and private space flights” →