14 DAY TRIAL // Officials from the United Nations have recently mandated the European Space Agency (ESA), and other space agencies around the world, to create an international collaboration, a group of organizations capable of acting together in the unlikely event that an asteroid were to be found heading for Earth.
The proposed high-level group will be responsible for coordinating all global responses in such an event, and ensuring that all space agencies in the initiative, and related organizations, are on the same page and react similarly to such a discovery.
At this point, this ambitious project includes space agencies in North America, South America, Asia and Africa, but has the potential to extend even further. All of these organizations will pull their respective expertise and capabilities together, in order to develop an integrated response that would safeguard our planet from an asteroid impact.
Deflecting a near-Earth object from an impact trajectory is achievable with current technologies, but the costs and know-how are still prohibitive to even large agencies like ESA and NASA. Any effort to prevent an asteroid collision will have to be international in nature.
To put things into perspective, around 10,000 of the 600,000 asteroids identified in the solar system are classified as NEO, because they occupy orbits that can, or could, bring them relatively close to Earth.
The threat of NEO was made painfully obvious in mid-February 2013, when an impactor with a diameter no larger than 20 meters (65 feet) exploded above the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, after entering the atmosphere at a speed of 66,000 kilometers (41,000miles) per hour.
The massive blast that ensued – the most widely covered event of this type in history – was estimated to have been 20 to 30 times more energetic than the atomic bomb that exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, at the end of the World War II.
In order to prevent us from being caught unprepared again, the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) has mandated the formation of the Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG, or same page).
“SMPAG will also develop and refine a set of reference missions that could be individually or cooperatively flown to intercept an asteroid,” explains Detlef Koschny, who holds an appointment as the head of the ESA Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program office's NEO Segment.
“These include precursor missions or test and evaluation missions, which we need to fly to prove technology before a real threat arises,” the official concludes.