Efforts to halt asteroids

NASA is not prepared to save the planet from a giant asteroid that could do to us what another space impact did to the dinosaurs. A danger of that scale is one we should guard against.

NASA knows of about 17,000 near-Earth objects that could be dangerous. On the bright side, it doesn’t know of any that will hit our planet in the next century. On the bright-things-you-don’t-want-to-see-inthe-sky side, Alan Harris of the German Aerospace Center says four new near-Earth objects are discovered every day.

A meteor would not have to wipe out civilization to cause a disaster. A 1908 meteor explosion knocked down 800 square miles of trees. No one may have died, but those trees were in a remote area of Russia.

Last month, NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency held an exercise to address a hypothetical challenge: Suppose it was discovered that a 330-foot rock would hit Southern California in just under four years. Could anything be done to stop it? Their conclusion: No. This should not be a surprise. In 2013, a congressman asked a NASA astronomer whether we were “technologically capable” of stopping an asteroid from hitting the planet. He said no, because it typically takes four years to get even a small project from approval to completion. “If we had spacecraft plans on the books already, that would take a year.”

Fortunately, there’s a proposal, involving NASA and the European Space Agency, to try to land on a space rock called Didymoon and move it a little to prove it can be done.