The threat of even a medium-sized object hurtling through space and colliding with our planet is very real, with thousands of these potentially city-destroying asteroids passing near the Earth every year, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
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While NASA and astronomers around the world track roughly 40,000 Near-Earth Objects (NEO), including the world-ending ones over 1km in diameter, the space agency is only able to keep tabs on around 60 percent of these smaller ‘city killer’ asteroids.
NASA’s planetary defence officer Dr Kelly Fast has said these unknown space rocks, measuring up to 200ft in diameter are what keeps him ‘up at night’, but soon he may be able to sleep soundly thanks to a collaboration with Bezos’ aeronautics firm Blue Origin.
The company announced that it would be working on the ‘Near-Earth Objects Hunter mission’ that it had created with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labaratory to defend the Earth from incoming space rocks.
Scientists will be testing a new multi-purpose spacecraft developed by Blue Origin that would stay in orbit and potentially use ‘multiple asteroid-deflection techniques’, to deflect any potential city killers.
Announcing the new planetary defense system, Blue Origin said that this could include using ‘ion beam deflection’, a high-tech way of using high-powered plasma ions to nudge an asteroid in another direction, or the classic ‘robust direct kinetic impact’.
This would be in the same vein as the 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), where NASA rammed a spacecraft into an asteroid at 14000mph to successfully alter its course. Although, it did also cause the mini moon Dimorphos to shatter.
If the Near-Earth Objects Hunter mission were to do this near to the planet, it could turn a sniper’s bullet into a shotgun blast, according to a report in the Planetary Science Journal.
But with 15,000 asteroids passing close to the Earth, figuring out how to keep our planet safe from could prove essential if we don’t want to go the way of the dinosaurs.
This threat is why NASA is also working on the Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, the first space telescope designed to specifically track down dangerous objects flying towards us.
It does this using infrared sensors to find objects that do not reflect very much light, instead looking for their ‘glow in the infrared spectrum as they’re heated by sunlight.’
Blue Origin has stated that it intends to launch the NEO Hunter mission at some point this year, though no official launch date has been announced so far.
Meanwhile, SpaceX will be launching the NEO Surveyor telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket sometime next year.
