Essay by Eric Worrall
Even with a hypothetical 14 year warning, we’re still not ready to deflect dangerous incoming space rocks.
Planetary Defence: Interagency Tabletop Exercise 5
Quick-Look Report
13 May 2024
2-3 April 2024 John Hopkins APL with remote participationExecutive Summary
U.S. interagency exercise sponsored jointly by NASA and FEMA to improve preparedness and planning for an asteroid impact; emphasis on international coordination and collaboration.
Scenario
- 72% chance than an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years
- Requirements for preventing its impact are unknown
- Models indicate the asteroid could devastate a regional- to country-scale area, if it should impact.
Objectives
- Awareness raising; space mission options; disaster preparedness; information sharing and public messaging.
Participants: Several U.S. agencies and organisations, as well as the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs and international partners.
TTX Takeaways
- 14-year timeline complicates decision making when large uncertainties still exist, which underscores the need for capabilities to obtain better information about the asteroid.
- Clear support for international collaboration at all stages.
Key Gaps
Read more: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/ttx5-quicklook-report-final.pdf?emrc=66776bee4e06b
- Decision-making processes and risk tolerance not understood.
- Limited readiness to quickly implement needed space missions
- Timely global coordination of messaging needs attention.
- Asteroid impact disaster management plans are not defined.
The press release is available here.
Russia wasn’t named on the list of international participants. I guess even when it comes to saving the world from a global threat, politics still comes first. I don’t know whether Russia or the Biden Administration was responsible for Russia’s failure to participate.
The hypothetical 14 years of warning postulated by the exercise seems a little on the optimistic side, when it comes to unexpected threats. Certainly there are large rocks which cross Earth’s orbit which are well known threats, such as 101955 Bennu, which might be a threat in the year 2182. But there are also occasional visitors from deep space like ʻOumuamua, the strange cigar shaped large space body which passed through the solar system at 26km / second in 2017. The total period of observation for ʻOumuamua was only 80 days.
In my opinion there is a simple, affordable way to be much better prepared for potential space visitors – build a Project Orion Spaceship, test it a few times, then keep it on ice until needed.
Project Orion is the most capable space launcher we can aspire to build with current levels of technology. The most powerful Orion concept design, Freeman Dyson’s momentum limited Orion, in theory had sufficient Delta-v to power a 133 year mission to Alpha Centauri at 3% of the speed of light after maintaining a 1G acceleration for 10 days, so there would be no shortage of power with this space drive to match orbits with even the fastest and most eccentric inbound space bodies. And most important of all, if all else fails, and Orion ship would have the power to alter the orbit of the space body just by pushing on it. Even a very substantial space body weighing billions of tons could be deflected by an Orion. An Orion could also be constructed with very little of the normal space vehicle weight saving considerations, the process of constructing an Orion would be more like building a large armoured battleship than a traditional chemical powered space launcher.
Detonating a few nuclear bombs in the atmosphere in some remote location to develop such an important new space capability seems a reasonable trade for being ready to save the world from a low probability high impact event which could manifest with very little warning.
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Greens would go apesh!t over an Orion. Their profound faith in LNT radiation models would make them imagine a repeat of Chixulub would be preferable.
What’s not to like?
You only have to look at Shoemaker-Levy to see how easily things can go wrong. Luckily it hit Jupiter and not Earth.
As I understand it, Jupiter has absorbed many planet killer asteroids over the millennia. Shoemaker-Levy was observable since technology improved enough to detect and view relatively closely the devastation that could have been wreaked if it had made it to Earth.
We definitely need to advance observation methods of our solar system to find more of these planet killers before they find us.
An observatory on the moon would be ideal. Launching from the moon would be good with its 20% of earth’s gravity and no atmosphere. I would suggest several practice missions to develop the best mission protocols
Observatories on the moon would be great. I’d also like to see manufacturing facilities and launch pads for space vehicles to take advantage of the lower gravity well.
Shades of Heinlein’s “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”.
Jupiter is a comet-sweeper. It helps keep potential planet-killers away from the inner solar system. For comets that get past Jupiter, the Earth has a large moon.
Possibly we could let Jupiter help us out by planning a rendezvous with the bolide where we can best employ jupiter’s gravitational direction for nudging. We would have to protect the moon as well!
re: “ NASA Asteroid Planetary Defence Exercise Reveals Big Gaps in Readiness ”
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BUT, the ‘Muslim Outreach’ program is on track … /s
1 Elect Morgan Freeman POTUS.
2 Find girl to rescue
3 And a dog for ditto
Then drive to the mountains to a grotto where to take shelter.
Alternatively, hide under the table.
Not prepared? Maybe the Boeing Starliner being stranded at the International Space Station is a clue? I was in Vietnam in July, 1969 when the first Apollo mission landed on the moon, and it was a giant leap for mankind. Now it’s stumbling around for DEI. Beam me up, Scotty, ……..
After watching the landing on TV in 1969, I thought for sure we would have lunar bases and lunar manufacturing by now. I think the flaw is that there is too much government influence on projects. Politics is a blight on humanity. Private enterprise is our only way to move forward.
Elon Musk’s enterprises for space are much more beneficial for humanity than his terrestrial ones. Well, reducing censorship on social media/communications is pretty good too.
In 1969 I was 14 years old. I watched every event I could including the landing – my dad worked on Apollo at North American Aviation/Rockwell Downy. Being 14 I certainly wasn’t thinking ahead very far. But it seemed a given we (the USA) would just charge on. Just before the time of the landing NAA laid off the Apollo team, and my dad went into the then new world of commercial computers.
I imagine that your dad was laid off because the governmental/political goal was reached – they were about to accomplish the political goal of what Kennedy proposed. Rather than exploiting the new exploration and research possibilities, the politicians succumbed to a vocal subset that wanted to spend money on handouts instead of future development.
The short-sightedness and inherent corruption of government is why the space shuttle program came and went. They hid the costs and other failings of the program until there were too many of them to cover up. Private enterprise developed and built reusable space vehicles that, apparently, are profitable.
Government is a parasite on the general populace and detrimental to human advancement.
FJB
In 1969 I was 9 and we lived in Bellflower.
Deep craters near the moon’s poles remain in perpetual darkness due to their location and rugged terrain, shielding them from sunlight and creating extremely cold conditions (around -238F).
Over billions of years, impacts from comets and asteroids have deposited water ice in these craters.
This ice can be extracted and used for drinking water or to generate oxygen for breathing. This would reduce the need to transport water from Earth and enable more extensive exploration of space.
It’s safe to say we are behind in space travel.
The US won the space race with its successful moon landings. The USSR decided they couldn’t keep up and the US quit pushing forward.
The premise of Apple TV’s For All Mankind is the Soviets beat us to the moon and the space race continued. I highly recommend this series,
With respect, it’s Viet Nam. Each word is one syllable.
Do you feel better? I won’t bother to tell you what we called it.
With respect, it appears Vietnam should be one word, not two. Did it properly used to be different?
Apparently, the present administrations are more concerned about a highly unlikely scenario involving the overhyped theory (that I think is thoroughly proven wrong) of global warming (or whatever the current nomenclature is) than a probable danger that could devastate the globe.
It is likely that a large piece of space rock will hit the Earth sometime in the future because we are constantly being bombarded with small ones presently.
https://www.space.com/33695-thousands-meteorites-litter-earth-unpredictable-collisions.html
I’m not sold on the Orion but, we do need better surveillance of our solar system for threats. We need more research on mitigation methods and production of multiple systems to save our asses.
As an additional benefit to researching and producing mitigation methods, we can test systems on moving resource rich asteroids for mining.
NASA can’t protect us from dangerous asteroids or comets but they have increased their diversity hires.
Which probably decreases the probability that they will save us from dangerous asteroids or comets.
It’s a government program which means it is subject to corruption, nepotism, and incompetency.
Oh, gawd, the image at top is so,,,,,cringe. That “band” of potential impact points would be constantly moving across the surface as Earth rotates. Giving a static list of possible impact points as cities is simple fearmongering. Far more important issues for people to be concerned about than this and climate catastrophicy.(yea, I did a Bush there, sue me)
ITYM catastroprophecy
In big red letters it states EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE and then says SCENARIO OVERVIEW.
It clearly states that it is something made up and can in no way be compared to the fearmongering the leftists have tried to brainwash the population with.
I think the scenario is far more likely to happen than the climate changing due to a beneficial trace gas.
Media is not going to attach that to the image, hence fearmongering. It will be used to scare the bejeezus out of the gullible. Look how well they did it with plant food.
With SpaceX’s BFR, there will be a whole lot more options when you can launch multiple tons into space at a time. Let’s wait and see what this brings to the table.
Also say the US does put something together and the remaining countries contribute nothing. Depending on where this space rock lands, should we charge them the cost of development on a condition for launch?
A very interesting exercise. This is the sort of thing that NASA , FEMA, Homeland Security and DoD ought to be doing. The key word in thinktank is THINK…they have to apply some very good minds to thinking about a potential future problem.
And, as they concluded, overall, we are massively ignorant, totally unprepared, and swamped by uncertainty.
This is a Good Thing. At least no one is trying to fool themselves, and us, that we are ready to deal with an approaching Earth-impacting asteroid.
Now they should convene in a JASON-like committee to come up with a plan.
“In my opinion there is a simple, affordable way to be much better prepared for potential space visitors – build a Project Orion Spaceship, test it a few times, then keep it on ice until needed.”
Sure! The one great benefit of the Orion concept is, it might deplete the whole nuclear arsenal of Earth for just one flight. Peace!
More realistically of course, you could never get this into space in the first place, unless you accept a little nulcear holocaust when launching it. And although I would never dare to question the excellence rocket manufacturers like Boeing, I am pretty certain the whole thing would fall apart after a few detonations.
Freeman Dyson didn’t think it would ‘fall apart after a few detonations’.
I don’t either. 🙂
‘…the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs…’
Sounds like Babylon Bee material.
UN Office of Outer Space Affairs (OASA) recently declared that outer space was heating up because of Earth’s CO2 emissions 🙂
I have no idea whether any of this makes sense but if we could keep NASA and NOAA busy on this and not wasting their time on CAGW we would be ahead.
Bob:
Yes!
And society would far less endangered by the protect-us-from-asteroids policy than the very dangerous climate policies we are being forced into.
We are at far more risk from the climate policies than we are from any “climate change” that mother nature has in store for us.
I’m sure they could figure out a way to make a space rock policy into a total control of everyone’s life policy.
72% chance than an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years
Reportedly hundreds, even thousands of small rocks enter the atmosphere every day but none cause any damage. They would not be noticed without instruments, or sometimes photographs, that capture information unavailable to human senses. In the last 10 years or so there have been reports of several apparently sizeable pieces of rock passing the earth closer than the moon, events that might have presented a problem on a slightly different orbit, but nothing dangerous actually happened. How long has it been since something dangerous really did happen, that is a real impact with damaging consequences to humans beyond one or two roofs?
I think their 72% chance within 14 years is in the same league with cries that Antarctica is melting and about to drown cities around the world – a budget enhancement ploy. It seems doubtful that a 72% probably worth bothering about actually exists in the next 14,000 years. That is most likely more probable than a danger from Greenland or Antarctica, but still should not keep anyone awake at night.
A pretty chunky astroid (~200m in diameter) is going to make a fly-by this saturday. It was only discovered a few days ago.
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/06/Close_approach_of_asteroid_2024_MK
Spaceweather.com publishes a table of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). These are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU.
On June 25, 2024 there were 2349 potentially hazardous asteroids.
As much as I agree with the idea of Orion as an intercept strategy, I would oppose it being launched from Earth as a primary means of defenst. Not because of any contamination of Earth, but of near Earth orbit. Earth’s magnetic field is a very good trap for charged particles, and each Orion bomblet puts out a lot of those. And these aren’t just charged particles like protons or alpha particles (helium nuclei), but highly radioactive fission products. Both the Soviet Union and the United States set off nuclear weapons in space in the late 1950s and early 1960s, creating artificial radiation belts where non existed before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_radiation_belts). Those radiation belts damaged satellites in orbit, and would have killed Alan Shepard had the apogee of his suborbital flight been just a few kilometers higher.
We now have too many vital assets in space to consider pulse nuclear propulsion to go from Earth to Earth escape. Better to build it on the Moon, where it could take off without endangering a lot of our orbital assets. Plus, the Moon’s orbital velocity of 1,022 m/s is available for establishing initial conditions for the trajectory.
Having said that, we should have an Orion interceptor on Earth in case it takes forever to build one on the Moon, just in case a really big killer like Oumuamua suddenly appears, headed straight for us. Then the fate of satellites and even astronauts on the ISS is secondary.