In 2005, the United States Congress laid out a clear mandate: To protect our civilization and perhaps our very species, by 2020, the nation should be

Outdoing the dinosaurs: What we can do if we spot a threatening asteroid

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2024-05-10 19:30:08

In 2005, the United States Congress laid out a clear mandate: To protect our civilization and perhaps our very species, by 2020, the nation should be able to detect, track, catalog, and characterize no less than 90 percent of all near-Earth objects at least 140 meters across.

As of today, four years after that deadline, we have identified less than half and characterized only a small percentage of those possible threats. Even if we did have a full census of all threatening space rocks, we do not have the capabilities to rapidly respond to an Earth-intersecting asteroid (despite the success of NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission).

Some day in the finite future, an object will pose a threat to us—it’s an inevitability of life in our Solar System. The good news is that it’s not too late to do something about it. But it will take some work.

The dangers are, to put it bluntly, everywhere around us. The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which maintains a list of (no points award for guessing correctly) minor planets within the Solar System, has a running tally. At the time of the writing of this article, the Center has recorded 34,152 asteroids with orbits that come within 0.05 AU of the Earth (an AU is one astronomical unit, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun).