NASA Asteroid Warning 2029

Nasa Asteroid Warning

How dangerous is 99942 Apophis ? 

Something is going to hit the Earth again.

There was an impact in Siberia within the last decade that was caused by an object about 20 meters across.

It broke up in the atmosphere and created a big shockwave. It was 10 times the size of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion.

It injured about a 1000 people of the town of Chelyabinsk. Of course, if you imagined this happening with a greater population density.

How NASA stop asteroid hit to earth ?

The purpose of the DART mission is to take your spacecraft, and you ram it into an asteroid to change the orbit so it won't hit the Earth. 

We're not just trying to figure out how to deal with what's coming. 

No, we're actually going to go out there and we're gonna try to stop it. 

Defense is all great, but you do need to score points. 

Earth gets hit by asteroids and small debris all the time, but most of the asteroids break up in the atmosphere. 

All of the bigger asteroids have been cataloged, like the dinosaur killers that are 10 kilometers or 1 kilometers plus. 

At this point, what we're looking for are things that are smaller that if they were to hit the Earth, it would create a regional impact. 

Asteroid impacts that are big enough to cause damage and cause real problems are rare, but the stakes are really high. 

So the problem with an asteroid impact is that the Earth is going around the sun, an asteroid is going around the sun, and they both wanna be in the same place at the same time. 

It's been over the past 20years that Planetary Defense has started to be taken seriously after an impact into Jupiter by a comet in the mid '90s.

This impact into SiberiaI think also opened a few more eyes. 

In 2016, the Planetary Defense Coordination Office was set up in NASA to demonstrate that we can do something about an asteroid impact if something is coming in. 

A nuclear device, for a long time it has been the only tool that people considered.

but the concern with dispersing an asteroid is that now you have two or five or 15 things and the pieces aren't that much smaller. 

• where will the 2029 asteroid hit ?

What we want to do is understand those orbits for all the asteroids that might come close to the Earth. 

Then it becomes a matter of picking the new orbit you want for the asteroid and then changing its speed. 

If you have 20 or 30 years to do that, then you only need to change the speed by a millimeter a second or less and then it'll miss the Earth entirely. 

The purpose of the DART mission as a whole is to test how this technique of a kinetic impactor would work if we ever needed to use it to deflect an asteroid. 

Didymos is a binary asteroid system, so there is a main body and it has a satellite. 

We call those Didymos A and Didymos B. By going to a binary asteroid system for the DART mission the scale is much smaller. 

Didymos B is moving around only at maybe 50 centimeters a second.

so if you change the speed by a millimeter a second, that is pretty easy to measure, given our capabilities. 

The awesome thing is our DART board, because one should have one with Didymos B on it. 

Over here which is the, this is the main asteroid and then Didymos B's clearly where everybody hits. 

So it's the counting down to the time we start the spacecraft INT where the whole spacecraft comes together. 

So we're very excited. 163 days is a very short amount of time. It's insane. So DART is launching ona SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in July of 2021. 

Each one of the NASAmissions has, you know, the main objective. So our most important one is redirecting the moon of an asteroid. 

Our second most important one, change its rotation period about 73 seconds. 

Our third objective is on the ground they're going to spend some time looking at the rotational period and are able to figure out how much we changed the period. 

• where is apophis now ?

Then our last objective is, when we're going to hit it, we're going to create a plume. 

It's called an ejecta and people want to be able to measure how much that plume helps push the moon along the way. 

The DART mission is a technology demonstrator for NASA. 

We're demonstrating not only our first planetary defense technique, we are demonstrating the NEXT-C Ion Engine.

We're demonstrating the Roll Out Solar Arrays, which is basically solar cells on big blankets and they provide a lot of power to the spacecraft and they're super lightweight. 

But the most important one, of course, is SmartNav and that's what allows us to hit the asteroid. 

Didymos B is about 160 meters, so about the size of the Washington Monument. It takes us about 12 months to get to the asteroid. 

We're going at about 15,000 miles an hour, which means that we're going to be going from New York to D.C. in one minute. 

As we get closer in,about eight hours out, we turn on all our systems, we're starting to stream pictures back to Earth. 

The spacecraft is still under ground control, though, and at four hours out, we turn it over to the smart navigation system. 

All we see is essentially one bright dot that might be about two to three pixels large and that's the Didymos system. 

All the folks that are gonna be in the mock behind me here, they're just gonna be listening.

they're not doing anything else, and the spacecraft itself is going to control what it's doing and is going to target the asteroid. 

At 80 minutes out is when Didymos B starts popping out from behind Didymos A, starting at one, two pixels. 

We're trying to aim for the center but imagine a center of a dog bone. 

• Where exactly are you trying to get to? 

So what you're trying to do, by SmartNav, is trying to create an envelope of what you think this moon might be like, even though you don't know the shape.

Parts of it could be completely dark and you don't actually see them and yet you're still trying to go for the center. 

It's very hard. - My biggest thing is to test the Smart Nav algorithm to death. 

We use many different asteroid models, run a bunch of simulations and see that the algorithm performs as we expect it to.

Then it's not until about two minutes out that we're able to completely see the whole moon in this field of view.

We have this communication delay of about a minute and a half. 

That time delay for any decision making process for humans in the loop in real time, especially at the speed that we are traveling, is essentially impossible. 

Then it's going to perform the impact. You're kind of done at the moment of impact, and if you miss it, that's really not good.