Earth has a “limited willingness” to “rapidly conduct” the necessary space missions to defend itself against a devastating asteroid impact, even with fourteen years’ notice.
During an exercise involving multiple U.S. government agencies in April 2024, NASA conducted a so-called “tabletop” game in which participants plotted their response to a 72 percent chance that an asteroid could hit Earth within 14 years. The results were sobering.
Underlying a bewildering number of moving parts is the likelihood that space agencies will not be ready to conduct the operations necessary to learn about and mitigate the threat, even with more than a decade of preparation.
“The process for making decisions about space missions in an asteroid threat scenario remains unclear. The process is not adequately defined in the US or internationally,” the report said.
That’s right. Not only are we not sure if we have the capacity to launch the space mission, but we are also unsure of the process required to decide which one to launch.
The game also revealed that “the role of the UN-endorsed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) in an asteroid impact threat scenario is not fully understood by all participants.”
As a result of these two expected shortcomings, NASA recommends that the international community establish a process to decide which options to pursue in different planetary defense scenarios and conduct an exercise to test that process. It also says that organizations should be informed about SMPAG’s role as a coordination and advisory group.
Those are the simple things anyway. Things really get complicated when we look at the sustained effort required, the political will and public communication.
The purely imaginary scenario explores how authorities would respond to information that there is a 72 percent chance that an asteroid will hit Earth on July 12, 2038. There are many major uncertainties and no new ground observations will be possible for seven months. The asteroid could be between 60 and 800 meters in diameter, although it is likely to be between 100 and 320 meters. There is a 45 percent chance that it will affect no one, a 47 percent chance that it will affect more than 1,000 people, a 28 percent chance that it will affect more than 100,000 people, an 8 percent chance that it will affect more than a million people affects, and a 0.04 percent chance that it will affect more than 10 million people.
The likely attack path includes cities in Mexico, the United States, Portugal, Spain, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Those who were unsure about the answers discovered that in addition to the shortcomings in launching space missions, there was also a problem with global politics and cooperation.
“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts over a fourteen-year period would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report said.
It recommends “periodic briefings and exercises to continue to raise awareness of planetary defense and enhance preparedness for preparation and response to an asteroid impact threat.”
Terik Daly, supervisor of the planetary defense section at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, told NPR that experts were not aware of any asteroids of substantial size that will hit Earth in the next 100 years.
But he also assured Earth’s inhabitants that “we don’t know where most of the asteroids large enough to cause regional devastation are.”
One of the most important results of the exercise is that we need the opportunity to find out more information about the asteroid.
But don’t worry, it may never happen. And if so, we’ll figure something out and muddle through. Just don’t look up. ®