Latest news with #PlanetaryDefenseCoordinationOffice
ABC News
3 days ago
- General
- ABC News
Meet the NASA scientist tasked with identifying asteroids on a collision course with Earth
The bright green meteor that blazed a trail over the skies of southern WA earlier this month served as a spectacular reminder of just how vulnerable the Earth is to threats from space. Country police officer and amateur meteorite hunter Marcus Scott found a tennis ball sized piece of the space rock, dubbed the Mother's Day meteorite, in a salt lake about 460 kilometres east of Perth. Hollywood has taught us to fear giant 'planet killer' asteroids, but it's the smaller space rocks that could destroy an entire city. Thankfully, a NASA scientist is on the case, with the job of protecting the planet against such threats. Dr Kelly Fast oversees NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is responsible for identifying and tracking asteroids, and figuring out if any of these rocky bodies could be on a collision course with Earth. Larger meteors can survive the trip through the atmosphere, often in spectacular fashion, like the Mother's Day meteorite which was estimated to be about half a metre in size. It slammed into the atmosphere above WA travelling at about 15 kilometres a second, before breaking up and landing in a salt lake in the Goldfields. Dr Fast and her colleagues around the world track more than 37,000 near-Earth asteroids, with the US Congress expecting NASA to find 90 per cent of asteroids larger than 140 metres. It's the smaller asteroids that pose the danger because they are harder to find, but could still destroy a land mass the size of an Australian city or even a state. "The asteroid hazard is a global issue. The first order of business is finding asteroids… it's the only natural disaster that you could potentially prevent," she said. Last year an asteroid named 2024 YR4 was discovered, with initial calculations indicating it could come dangerously close to Earth in just seven years' time. With a diameter of approximately 50 metres, if it struck the earth it could cause widespread devastation of a similar scale to the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908. That explosion occurred over a sparsely populated area, flattening more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest. Dr Fast said there were a few different forms of technology that could potentially be used to neutralise the threat from an asteroid, and they all sound like they are straight out of a science fiction movie. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphous in September 2022, successfully changing the orbit of the 160-metre diameter celestial body. "That was the simplest technique — to impact an asteroid and change its speed, and it was successfully tested with DART," Dr Fast said. To date, it's been the only real world test to save the planet from destruction caused by a rogue space rock. Other techniques being studied include ion beam deflection, using a spacecraft to fire charged particles at the asteroid, giving it a slight nudge to change its orbit. The 'Star Trek' sounding "gravity tractor" is another possible solution, and entails parking an object next to the asteroid and using the slight change in gravity to change its orbit. "And then there's what we always like to call the Hollywood option, because it's what's always used in the movies — a nuclear deflection," Dr Fast said. Although she warned such a technique could create even more of a hazard from the debris field of an exploded asteroid. Dr Fast is hoping there won't be a need to use any of these techniques in our lifetime, but says developing the technology to protect the planet will be a gift for future generations. This week Dr Fast spoke at the Australian Space Awards in Sydney, where she emphasised Australia's importance in keeping the planet safe from the threat of asteroids. And while Australia might be half a world away from NASA headquarters in Washington D.C., two teams of Australian researchers form part of the International Asteroid Warning Network. The University of New South Wales Canberra team search for asteroids using optical telescopes as well as the Parkes Radio Telescope, famous for its role in broadcasting Neil Armstrong's moon walk. On the other side of the country, researchers at the University of Western Australia use the one-metre diameter Zadko Telescope, located about 70 kilometres north of Perth in Gingin, to scan the skies for threats from space. Hollywood-born Dr Fast has a degree in astrophysics and a doctorate in astronomy. She also has the honour of having a nearly three-kilometre diameter space rock named after her, Asteroid Kellyfast. "Like pretty much all asteroids that are named for people, let's hope it stays safely out in the main belt [of space]" she said with a laugh.
Miami Herald
11-05-2025
- Science
- Miami Herald
The researchers charged with defending the planet against asteroids
In December, astronomers identified that the asteroid YR4 had a small but not insignificant chance of striking Earth in 2032, a scenario that experts postulated could have more explosive potential than 500 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. Researchers reclassified YR4 as a non-threat in February, but the interim period when the asteroid was considered a threat, was the first time that the International Asteroid Warning Network had been activated to respond to a threat since its formation in 2014. "The fact is that humanity does have a system that has been put in place in the last decade, essentially, and it worked for YR4," said Danica Remy, president of the Mill Valley-based B612 Foundation, a nonprofit focused on identifying near-Earth objects (NEOs) that pose a threat to humanity. The global apparatus of researchers and cosmologists had formed in 2013 in the wake of an exploding meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia, that shattered glass for miles around. "We did not see that one coming," said Katie Kumamoto, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor. "There was no warning until there was actually a fireball in the sky being caught on all of those dashboard cameras on people's cars. I think that was a big wake-up call." Though astronomers have known about the threat posed by NEOs since the 1970s, efforts to catalogue potentially dangerous asteroids and meteors have only seriously materialized in the past decade, according to researchers from LLNL, the Marin County-based Asteroid Institute and NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office has identified 873 NEOs larger than one kilometer, a size that could be "a disaster of the scale of anything we've seen," according to Planetary Defense Officer Emeritus Lindley Johnson, who established the office in 2016. Another 11,266 NEOs have been identified that are large enough to wipe out entire cities if they landed in a metropolitan area, Johnson added. Johnson said NASA's catalogue has now identified more than 95% of NEOs that pose a threat to Earth. "Even though we now feel we've got a good handle on the population of large near-Earth asteroids, we're still working on understanding what the smaller population is," Johnson said. "We now have this tasking from NASA to find everything that's larger than 140 meters in size." The last major asteroid impact on Earth was the Tunguska Event in 1908 in Siberia, where an asteroid, estimated to be between 50-100 meters in diameter, exploded in the Earth's atmosphere and flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest. Asteroids of that size are estimated to strike Earth once every 200-300 years, while asteroids larger than one kilometer strike Earth once every 500,000 years on average, according to the University of Arizona. The International Asteroid Warning System's researchers, recognizing that an asteroid impact is an inevitability rather than a possibility, have worked to develop numerous strategies to deploy against an asteroid whose trajectory is aligned with Earth. Some of these strategies have already been tested. On Sept. 26, 2022, NASA successfully redirected the asteroid Dimorphos as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) using the strategy of a kinetic impactor - a fancy way of saying scientists crashed into an asteroid and changed its trajectory. The DART mission was a huge step in the planetary defense field, proving that the kinetic impactor could be utilized in the future. "Just changing the speed at which something is moving in orbit, that changes the orbit forever in the future," Johnson said. "The orbital shape, size of the orbit, and where it's going is all determined by the orbital velocity around the sun." Like a real-world game of Galaga, the kinetic impactor strategy works for smaller space rocks, however, other larger asteroids require more intense interventions. Asteroid Institute co-founder Ed Lu and astronaut Stanley G. Love invented the "gravity tractor" method, where, if given enough time, a spacecraft could be placed near an asteroid's gravitational field, "fine-tuning" its orbital trajectory safely away from Earth, Remy said. But what if the asteroid is too large for a kinetic impactor and scientists are too late to identify an impending impact? At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Kumamoto and other researchers are working on a solution: nuclear deflection. For this strategy, a nuclear explosive device would be triggered near an asteroid, sending it off its orbital path and ablating material from its surface. "Because there's just so much energy in a nuclear explosive device, we would be able to apply a much bigger push to the asteroid than we could get from a kinetic impactor," Kumamoto said about the "nuclear option" of planetary defense. "We don't understand that one as well as we understand option number one and option number two." Part of the reason for Kumamoto and other LLNL researchers' limited understanding of nuclear deflection is that international law prevents them. The Outer Space Treaty, approved by the United Nations in 1967, prohibits nuclear weapons in space and limits nations from testing military weapons on any celestial body. Space might be the final frontier, but no nation holds claim to it. In 2014, in the wake of the Chelyabinsk meteor, the United Nations brought greater focus to asteroid threats and planetary defense by sanctioning "International Asteroid Day" on June 30, a commemoration of the Tunguska Event in 1908. Originally founded by Remy's B612 Foundation, along with physicist Stephen Hawking, astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Queen guitarist Brian May in 2014, Asteroid Day is a call to action to keep humanity safe from what lies beyond our atmosphere - because in a world of natural disasters, one of the most devastating phenomena comes from space. "Unlike a hurricane or a tsunami or an earthquake or super volcano, there's really absolutely nothing we can do about those right now," Remy said. "Whereas with an asteroid impact, there are deflection options, and the work that we're doing is really important because warning time is everything." Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Axios
21-02-2025
- Science
- Axios
An asteroid could hit Earth in 2032. Don't panic — yet
The chances of a 130- to 300-foot-wide asteroid hitting Earth just a few days before Christmas 2032 are increasing — but don't panic (or celebrate) just yet. Why it matters: The near-Earth asteroid, officially named "2024 YR4," could be a regional hazard if it actually hits the planet, NASA says. Driving the news: The odds that YR4 will hit Earth have been creeping up over the past few days, and stand at 2.1% as of Feb. 12. Those probably aren't numbers you'd play in Vegas, but it's still a 1-in-48 chance of impact. Threat level: YR4 currently rates as a 3 on the 0-to-10 Torino scale, which measures asteroid collisions' potential hazards. That translates into possible "localized damage" — which means you wouldn't want to be near the impact zone, but this isn't considered an existential Earth-wide threat. Reality check: YR4 was only first reported to near-Earth asteroid watchers in late January, and it's possible that its impact odds will lessen as researchers spend more time observing and learning about it and its path through space. What they're saying: "Even though it's a very, very low impact probability, it's not often that something this size even reaches that level," Kelly Fast, acting planetary defense officer at NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, tells Axios. "It's a chance to continue to bring the capabilities we have to bear to get the most information possible, to hopefully get enough information for the probability to drop to zero, to know well enough that it's going to pass the Earth safely — and if not, then to have that information also." "But it's so early that, at 2%, it's at that level where, okay, planetary defenders of the world, keep an eye out. But otherwise, it's not something to lose sleep over." What's next: NASA is planning to launch the Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope later this decade, which will look for potentially threatening objects using infrared sensors. Those are better able to spot darkly-colored asteroids compared to visible light telescopes, Fast says. And in 2022, NASA successfully tested asteroid-deflection technology that one day could truly save our bacon — no Bruce Willis or Ben Affleck required.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA identifies asteroid that could hit Earth. Here's why you shouldn't panic
(QUEEN CITY NEWS) — NASA has upped the chances of impact of an asteroid currently orbiting in deep space. The object at hand, 2024 YR4 was discovered in December 2024 during its most recent flyby of the Earth, with a diameter or roughly 180 feet. Recent orbital calculations have increased the chance of Earth impact to 1 in 44 (2.3%) on Dec. 22, 2032. Why asteroid 2024 YR4 is unlikely to hit Earth in 2032 and how scientists keep track Who is monitoring the skies for asteroids like this one? Well, it is a relatively new department within NASA called the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. This office was created in 2016 with the explicit task from Congress to find and track every asteroid at least 140 meters in size. To date, 98% of all asteroid and comets at least 1 kilometer in size have been found in the solar system. So, is it time to panic? In a word, no, as it is likely further observations of 2024 YR4 will drop to the impact chances to zero. But if the improbable does happen, would a potential impact look like? It could resemble very much like the Tunguska Event of 1908 in Russia where an asteroid of similar size exploded over Siberia. It is estimated that 2024 YR4 would have the energy of roughly a 10-megaton bomb, which if impacted in a populated area could be devastating. NASA has already potential interception techniques for asteroids hazardous to Earth with the DART program where an impactor was sent to hit an asteroid and change its path. So, while its unlikely, there are plans to deal with this asteroid if impact chances do go up for 2024 YR4. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Chances Of City-Killing Asteroid Impact In 2032 Upped To 1 in 43
In case you needed more proof that we live in a near-apocalyptic cyberpunk dystopia, the United States' planetary defense office has warned about a possible collision from an asteroid with the potential to level cities. The asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, has a one in 43 chance of hitting Earth — and that number seems to rise every time NASA updates its figures. Y'know, in case you didn't have enough things to worry about. The phrase 'planetary defense' may sound like science fiction, but it's a real department within NASA. Rather than threats from Romulans or Borg, though, the real Planetary Defense Coordination Office protects against impacts from asteroids (presumably the office has Bruce Willis on retainer). Recently, PDCO has been tracking 2024 YR4 to determine whether or not it'll hit us — and how much damage it'll do if it lands here. The asteroid is predicted to make its closest approach in 2032, when it'll have a 2.2 percent chance of hitting us. That sounds low, but it's the greatest risk we've had in decades. Perhaps more interesting than the raw chance of a hit is the change in that chance. Each time NASA checks, the number seems to creep ever higher — a couple tenths of a percent here, a few more there. The chance has gone from one in 83 to one in 53, and most recently to one in 43. With the closest approach scheduled for late December of 2032, there's a lot of time for that number to climb. Clearly, NASA needs to start teaching oil drillers how to be astronauts right now. If there's one chance humanity has for survival, it's the clashing personalities of Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis up there on that rock, risking their lives that we might all survive. There is no better option than this. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
