Asteroid flyby in October: A drill for the end of the world?
NASA hopes to see if defense system works
Are we ready for an asteroid impact? This October, NASA will conduct a drill to see how well its planetary defense system would work if an actual asteroid were heading straight for Earth. While these sort of drills have been done in the past with pretend asteroids, this one will feature a real asteroid, one that astronomers are confident will miss the Earth as it zooms by Oct. 12.
“The question is: How prepared are we for the next cosmic threat?” said Vishnu Reddy of the University of Arizona, who’s also a NASA consultant. “So we wanted to test how ready we are for a potential impact by a hazardous asteroid.”
“Scientists have always appreciated knowing when an asteroid will make a close approach to and safely pass the Earth because they can make preparations to collect data to characterize and learn as much as possible about it,” said Michael Kelley, a NASA program scientist.
The asteroid has not been seen since its 2012 discovery, when it sped past Earth at about one- fourth the distance from Earth to the moon. It’s been too distant and too faint to be detected over the past five years. As it starts to approach Earth this summer, large telescopes will be used to re- establish its precise trajectory.
The asteroid, known as 2012 TC4, could come as close as 4,200 miles to Earth, NASA said. That’s fairly close, given that the moon is about 239,000 miles away.
The space rock measures between 30 and 100 feet long, roughly the same size as the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013.
Fortunately, no known asteroid poses a significant risk of impact with Earth over the next 100 years, according to NASA.