NASA is not prepared to save the planet from a giant asteroid that could do to us what another space impact did to the dinosaurs. A danger of that scale is one we should guard against.
NASA knows of about 17,000 near-Earth objects that could be dangerous. On the bright side, it doesn’t know of any that will hit our planet in the next century. A meteor would not have to wipe out civilization to cause a disaster. A 1908 meteor explosion knocked down 800 square miles of trees. No one may have died, but those trees were in a remote area of Russia.
Last month, NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency held an exercise to address a hypothetical challenge: Suppose it was discovered that a 330-foot rock would hit Southern California in just under four years. Could anything be done to stop it?
Their conclusion: No.
This should not be a surprise. In 2013, a congressman asked a NASA astronomer whether we were “technologically capable” of stopping an asteroid from hitting the planet. He said no, because it typically takes four years to get even a small project from approval to completion. “If we had spacecraft plans on the books already, that would take a year.”
Fortunately, there’s a proposal, involving NASA and the European Space Agency, to try to land on a space rock called Didymoon and move it a little to prove it can be done. The proposal builds on the Rosetta comet landing. But that comet, which was already an amazingly distant and tiny bull’s-eye, was much bigger than Didymoon.
The proposal should get the government’s full support. And equipment should be prepared in case we ever need to save the planet from an approaching space rock. Moreover, this would put government resources—American and foreign—behind improving rocket technology. That improved technology might be useful for other purposes. And the project might help motivate voters to support space programs.