How NASA Would Alert the Public About an Apocalyptic Asteroid Impact | Top Vip News

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By Jesse O’Neill

A government agency that monitors extinction events explained how they would warn the planet’s eight billion people of impending death if a devastating asteroid were to hurtle toward Earth.

NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is tasked with identifying an incoming threat decades in advance. Just last month, the agency said Earth was safe from a projected 1 in 10 million chance of a collision on March 3.

“We definitely want to find them all before they find us,” program leader Lindley Johnson.
Executive of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, he told Business Insider Saturday.

Johnson’s office tracks the 2,300 known asteroids in the solar system, with special attention to the roughly 150 that could cause an extinction event.

If an apocalyptic impact were imminent, a global coalition of astronomers called the International Asteroid Warning Network would be warned. If they agreed to the threat, the situation would get worse.

“I don’t have a red phone on my desk or anything like that,” Johnson said. “But we do have formal agreements
procedures by which notification of a serious impact would be provided.”

If the asteroid was headed toward the US and did not appear large enough to impact other countries, the White House would be notified and a public statement issued.

If the space rock was expected to have an international impact, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs would intervene.

This scenario was satirized in the 2021 Netflix satire “Don’t Look Up,” when greed and ineptitude led American leaders to fail in their response to an impending space rock that ended up wiping out humanity.

However, NASA has tried an option that was weighed by the film’s fictional officials: deflecting a dangerous asteroid with a human projectile.

The agency crashed a small spacecraft into a 530-foot-wide space rock millions of miles away at 15,000 miles per hour in 2022, successfully deflecting its course in a test of a potentially Earth-saving mission.

NASA plans to test more deflection methods in the future, including a “gravity tractor” technique, in which a spacecraft would be deployed to follow an asteroid and pull it out of orbit with gravity.

Officials are also studying the possibility of using an ion beam to change the course of the space rock.

However, those options would not be viable if the asteroid was detected less than five years before an imminent impact, and if there were only a few months’ warning, there would not be much to do to avoid the crisis, according to the article.

The next possible collision that scientists have identified is in 2182.

There is a 1 in 2,700 chance that Bennu, a small near-Earth asteroid, will collide with Earth that year. according to nasa. For that to happen, Bennu would have to pass through a “gravitational keyhole” in 2135.

It is hoped that advance warning will help the human race avoid the kind of catastrophe comically described in “Don’t Look Up.”

“That gives us a lot of time to try to do something about it while they’re still in space.”
so that we completely avoid any catastrophe here on Earth,” Johnson said.

According to the article, such a collision would cause an explosion equivalent to 24 nuclear bombs.

An asteroid would have to be at least 460 feet wide and cross Earth’s orbit at half the distance to the Sun or less to be considered “potentially hazardous.”

When the six-mile-wide Chicxulub creator struck the area around Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, its shock wave was two million times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb, according to the report.

A similar mass extinction impact would collapse cities and trigger tsunamis, while leaving a cloud of hot debris that would block out the sun and freeze the planet, making it inhospitable to most life.