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| Courtesy NASA |
The B612 Foundation is a private non-profit dedicated to detecting and defending the Earth from large errant asteroids. In April of 2018 the organization reported that it was not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ a devastating strike occurs, putting the odds of a hit at 100 percent. Don’t go running into the night screaming, “The asteroids are coming!”. You have to keep in mind the timeline they are working with. For instance NASA calls it a “…low probability…high-consequence event”. It is low probability for next month. If we expect to be around as a civilization for very long, it is a certainty. A three quarter mile diameter rock hits every 500,000 years; three miles in diameter every 20 million years. Feel better? That’s just probabilities. It could still hit tomorrow.
It takes 7 trucks to move the same number of paper bags as one truck moving plastic bags.
The U.S. National Science and Technology Council came out a couple of months after B612 Foundation's announcement with a warning on how unprepared the United States is in the event of an asteroid strike. In collaboration with NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it released recommendations called the “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy Action Plan”.
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| 10199 Chariklo w/ ring system - Courtesy NASA |
With federal agencies looking into the problem, we’ve established that an asteroid strike is a thing and it will take place. It is just a matter of when it happens and how we will respond to it.
It just so happens that several companies have formed to create the nucleus of an asteroid mining industry. This is fortuitous timing. A good case can be made for the governments of the world funding these asteroid mining companies as priority space-based projects. Why? Because these companies’ plans to capture asteroids and guide them into a near Earth orbit is probably the best bet mankind has of protecting the Earth from a cataclysmic strike by an asteroid.
Plastic grocery bags prefer this as their second career.
Think about it. Currently, there is nothing on Earth or in orbit around the Earth to counter the mass of an asteroid moving 5,000 to 22,000 mph relative to Earth. That’s before Earth’s gravity adds thousands of miles per hour to that velocity.
That mass is why it’s such a bad idea to explode a nuclear device to break up the asteroid. While it may break it up, the deflective forces will not be enough to overcome the enormous mass moving at those speeds. Now a slug has become double aught buckshot moving, essentially, on the same trajectory at the same velocity.
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| Vesta is 330 miles in diameter - Courtesy NASA |
Another asteroid, however, may have the mass to actually deflect a threatening rock from space into an orbit that misses the Earth. The more asteroids that mining companies have squirreled away in various orbits around Earth, the more ammunition there is to use. Material strength and mass can be matched up between tamed asteroids and the maverick. Engines left attached to the asteroids when they were moved into their orbits can be cranked up and the asteroid set on an intercepting course to the interloper.
The mining companies and world governments have to be in agreement about who covers the cost of such an operation with governments taking the lion’s share. Earth’s governments should look at this as a premium on an insurance policy. Asteroid mining companies should look at it as the right thing to do, despite the inevitable guidelines the governments involved will want to impose on them. The companies will have do do things like store enough fuel on each asteroid parked in orbit to perform such maneuvers and maintain qualified personnel whether they actually need them or not in the day to day course of asteroid mining.
The best thing would be to identify dangerous asteroids a long time before they strike the Earth and intercept them with the same equipment asteroid mining companies are going to use to retrieve asteroids. This is another reason governments should be willing to help out the nascent astroid mining industry. At least they can develop the equipment to do this. Once these robotic retrievers are latched onto the asteroid, the decision can then be made to deflect it or bring it on in and park it where we know it is safe.
Here is the problem. There’s an estimated 150 million asteroids in our Solar System. Some of them have such a low albedo they are essentially black - very hard to locate. Because there are so many, those that have been identified as not being a problem could become a problem by being jostled or struck by another asteroid, changing their orbit to a killer trajectory.
While deflecting an asteroid seems like an audacious undertaking, it may be a scheme that saves Earth from being devastated by a strike that could have the energy of millions of nuclear weapons going off at once. This sizable force could set off tsunamis, earthquakes, and years of crop-threatening weather. That is not counting the actual impact devastation hundreds of miles in diameter.
Keep in mind we may eventually have the technology to identify and track all of these objects, but that may be a couple of hundred years from now. In the meantime, there’s a rock in orbit around the Sun with our civilization’s name on it. We need to start thinking about how to stop it.
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