Officials from NASA and other international organizations recently completed a simulation test to assess their ability to respond to a hypothetical asteroid that could collide with Earth in 2038.
The tabletop exercise went as planned and was largely considered a success by those involved. However, some media have misreported what happened, either making it seem like the impact scenario was real or that we are worryingly incapable of dealing with it – neither of which is true.
Between April 2 and April 3, nearly 100 experts from more than 25 organizations in the U.S. and abroad—including NASA’s Office of Planetary Defense Coordination, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Office of Space Affairs of State Department – met at Johns. Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, to participate in the Interagency Planetary Defense Tableau Exercise.
The event, which involved team members informally discussing possible responses to a hypothetical asteroid strike, was the fifth and largest of its kind, following similar meetings in 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2022, sister site Live Science Space.com reported.
“A large asteroid impact is potentially the only natural disaster that humanity has the technology to predict years in advance and take action to prevent.” Lindley Johnsonexecutive program manager for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, said in a statement about the event. Simulating such a scenario can help provide expert experience in handling such situations and highlight knowledge gaps in current protocols that need to be addressed in the future, he added.
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On June 20, the leadership members of the training team shared and discussed the the results of the last simulation in one online press conference. During this event, they revealed for the first time to the public the hypothetical scenario used in this year’s exercise.
In the new hypothetical scenario, astronomers discover a large asteroid with a 72% chance of hitting Earth in 14 years – on July 12, 2038. Detailed information about this hypothetical asteroid is not immediately available, but its trajectory may determine it on a collision course with major cities, including Dallas; Washington DC; Madrid; and Algeria, Algeria. Uncertainty over the size of the space rock means that any potential impact could kill anywhere from 1,000 to 10 million people.
Some media, including The Times of India AND NDTV News, took this scenario out of context while reporting on the conference. They used misleading headlines suggesting that the threat presented in the exercise was real and that NASA had “issued a warning” about the impending danger.
Other points – including Daily Mail AND registry — suggested that the exercise showed that we are ill-prepared to deal with this scenario in real life. However, these reports are also inaccurate.
Threat assessment
This year’s tabletop exercise presented a unique and “particularly challenging” scenario for the officials gathered in Maryland, Johnson said.
Despite having more time before possible impact than in previous iterations of the exercise, experts had less information about the hypothetical incoming space rock than ever before. For example, they were told it could be anywhere between 200 and 2,600 feet (60 to 800 meters) wide. Also unclear was the asteroid’s composition, which affects how destructive it would be.
To make matters worse, the scenario involved the asteroid disappearing behind the sun for seven months shortly after it was discovered, meaning experts had to make plans without really knowing what would happen.
The team considered three options: first, wait for the asteroid to reappear for more observations; second, send a spacecraft to fly by the asteroid and learn more about it; and third, launching a mission to fly by the space rock, which would maximize the amount of information we can learn about it.
The consensus was to send a spacecraft to learn more about the asteroid, rather than wait to see what would happen or launch a much more expensive rendezvous mission at short notice. However, officials also raised concerns about our ability to do so, particularly because of how quickly such a mission would need to be assembled and whether politicians would give the green light for funding (up to $400 million). without further clarification of the situation. As a result, 19% of participants said they thought we would not be ready to plan and execute such a mission in this scenario.
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Some media outlets dwelled on this uncertainty, claiming that these potential obstacles would completely hamper our ability to deal with the asteroid. But in reality, most experts believed that such a mission was feasible.
Because the tabletop exercise didn’t simulate anything beyond the initial decision-making phase after the asteroid was discovered, there’s also no telling what would have happened next, making it impossible to label the event a failure, as some media did. .
Are we really ready?
In reality, we have never been in a better position to deal with scenarios like the one in the tabletop exercise, NASA representatives wrote.
This is due in part to the recent triumph of NASA’s Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which diverted successfully AND change the shape of asteroid Dimorphos behind crashing a spaceship into it on September 26, 2022. Although not a perfect analog for stopping a potentially deadly asteroid from hitting Earth (Dimorphos posed no threat to our planet), the test showed for the first time that the asteroid deflection technique called the “impactor kinetic ” Method is a sustainable way to protect our planet.
NASA also plans to launch Geodesy of near-Earth objects — a space telescope dedicated to searching for new near-Earth asteroids — by the summer of 2028. Once in orbit, the telescope will increase our ability to spot dangerous space rocks, including those located close to the Sun’s glow, the researchers write.
Continuing tabletop exercises like these will also help improve our preparedness for a possible asteroid strike. For example, about 90% of participants in the last exercise said they felt better equipped to deal with the challenges raised in the exercise after it was over.