Waiting for Lucky April 13

Yesterday, the asteroid 2007 TU 24 passed through the vicinity of our planet at a distance of only one and a half times further than the distance to the Moon, while today 2007 WD5 will make a fly-by around the planet Mars at a distance of only 26,000 kilometers. Oh... you might have noticed how both asteroid's names start with 2007, that's because they were discovered in late 2007. In fact, 2007 WD5 was discovered five days after it passed through the vicinity of Earth before heading to Mars, meaning that both could have crashed into Earth in less than a month and we couldn't have been able to do nothing about it.

How lucky will we be next time? Pretty lucky, say astronomers since the biggest threat to Earth right now, asteroid Apophis, will come in the close proximity and miss the planet on 13 April 2036. Almost a century ago, the Tunguska event took place, when a relatively small asteroid collided with Earth's atmosphere and exploded over the Siberian region only to level about 2000 square kilometers of forest. If a similar asteroid detonates over a populated region of the globe such as a city, it will most likely leave it in ruin.

Although it is predicted that asteroid Apophis will fly by Earth in 2036, we are not out of danger by any means. Another large asteroid could be detected during this time and it could be heading right towards our planet, or Apophis itself could pass through a so-called gravitational keyhole that would take it on a collision course with Earth in 2029. The Near Earth Object program administered by NASA currently has no capability of detecting objects smaller than 140 meters in diameter. Apparently this is not a problem, because the asteroid 2007 TU24 is nearby twice as big and was only discovered three months before the fly-by.

Target Earth hopes to partially resolve the problems related to detecting and tracking asteroids on the sky. Target Earth is a program that focuses on a series of NEO projects supported by The Planetary Society which, by the end of next month, will announce the winner for its competition which involves designing a mission that would rendezvous with potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids to 'tag' them, in order to determine accurately if the respective rock enters a trajectory that will intersect that of Earth, where it would impact Earth, in case of an imminent collision, and will provide with warning for preparation of deflection missions.

In case you have a really good plan on how to do this, then you should also participate, since the prize is worth 50,000 U.S. dollars. In the future, the Target Earth program will probably approach more and more NEO research, meaning they will engage missions to discover and track the position of asteroids through the solar system.

As you probably already know, neither the ESA nor NASA have plans regarding asteroid deflection or how to tag an asteroid to track it across the sky. This was the main reason why the ESA and NASA teamed up and created the Society's Apophis competition, awarding the best mission designers 50,000 dollars in prize.