Nasa calls on Musk to help ram asteroid off course
Human survival could come down to Elon Musk after Nasa chose his space company to help to deflect asteroids that may one day hurtle towards Earth.
Nasa is planning to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid at high speed to see whether it can alter its course.
Musk’s company, SpaceX, will help to launch the spacecraft in question. Nasa will use Falcon 9, a rocket designed by the company, to take its asteroid-averting spacecraft into orbit.
The project is called Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) and is being designed in partnership with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
While tiny asteroids hit Earth all the time, what Dart is trying to prevent is an asteroid the size of Big Ben hitting us, which happens every few thousand years or so. Such an asteroid would cause severe damage on a regional scale, leaving millions of people dead, as well as creating blast waves, earthquakes, fires and tidal waves.
If its course could be altered at the right time by only 1cm per second it could be enough to avert disaster.
Nasa has picked a test asteroid and its moon to try out the theory. Didymos A has a diameter of about 760m, and its moon, Didymos B, is about 161m across.
Dart will aim to hit Didymos B, changing its orbit and affecting the timing of when the moon moves around the larger asteroid by a fraction of 1 per cent.
The spacecraft will use a ‘‘solar electric propulsion system’’ to hit Didymos B and will be moving at around 6km per second. An onboard camera and autonomous navigation software will help to detect the asteroid’s moon and assist in the strike. A secondary spacecraft will observe the event and measure the degree of deflection it causes.
Nasa’s spacecraft will be launched in California in June
2021 at a cost of US$69 million
(NZ$102m). In October 2022, it will have separated from Falcon 9 and will try to strike the smaller asteroid about 11 million km from Earth.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 to send tourists into space with reusable rockets. It has been working with Nasa for more than a decade, having made 16 resupply missions to the International Space Station. It plans to fly humans to the ISS next year.