NASA prepares for asteroid apocalypse

Today’s forecast: the end of the world.

Well, not really, but if a big enough asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, we’d really have something more than scattered showers to worry about.

NASA (not to mention the rest of us) would like to avoid such a catastrophe. The agency is conducting a drill this week to see how we’d prepare if a giant space rock was hurtling toward our home planet.

“Although large impacts are rare, it’s important to be prepared,” NASA said in a statement. “That’s why NASA, other U.S. agencies and international partners gather periodically to simulate impact scenarios and discuss the best course of action.”

The project will play out as a tabletop exercise through Friday at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Maryland, Space.com said. NASA experts prepared a fictional scenario in which an asteroid apparently will crash into Earth in 2027.

Space.com said, “They’ll talk through how to determine what regions face what risks and how to respond – all in the hopes that if they ever face a similar situation in real life, they’ll be ready for it.”

To avoid any unnecessary panic, the conference plainly states on its website that “although this scenario is realistic in many ways, it is completely fictional and does NOT describe an actual potential asteroid impact.”

Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, said in a statement that “these exercises have really helped us in the planetary defense community to understand what our colleagues on the disaster management side need to know. This exercise will help us develop more effective communications with each other.”

The drill is part of the National NearEarth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan developed over two years and published by the White House in June 2018. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which leads the drill, is the federal entity in charge of coordinating efforts to protect Earth from hazardous asteroids. It’s responsible for finding, tracking and characterizing potentially hazardous objects and issuing warnings about possible impacts.

For more than 20 years, NASA and its international partners have scanned the skies for “near-Earth objects,” or asteroids and comets that orbit the sun and come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. NASA has participated in six impact exercises – three at Planetary Defense Conferences (2013, 2015, 2017) and three jointly with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Deflecting an asteroid on a collision course with Earth would have to be done years before the predicted impact. The two most promising techniques NASA is investigating are the “kinetic impactor” (striking an asteroid with an object to slightly slow it down) and the “gravity tractor” (gravitationally tugging on an asteroid by placing a large mass near it).

Fortunately, no known asteroid poses a significant risk of impact over the next 100 years, NASA says.

A study in 2017 found the deadliest effects of an asteroid impact would be ferocious winds of up to 1,000 mph and intense shock waves.