A team of scientists from China’s National Center for Space Sciences have come up with a plan to launch a fleet of rockets into space to practice deflecting an asteroid from Earth to save humanity in a hypothetical apocalyptic outcome . The study has been funded by the Chinese government.
Its target is the asteroid Bennu, a 492-meter-wide spinning top-shaped body whose orbit will take it 7.5 million kilometers from Earth from 2175-2199. After this time, the space rock will be classified as dangerous, and scientists have predicted that it will have a 1 in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth. If it did, it could kill millions of people. And Bennu could hit our planet in about a century.
Researcher Li Mingtao and his colleagues at the National Center for Space Sciences in Beijing were tasked with finding out how China can intervene and try to make sure humans don’t follow the path of dinosaurs whose asteroid was about 10 km wide.
How to avoid mass destruction
However, even if it is soon, Chinese researchers believe it is a good opportunity to put simulations into practice to deflect potentially dangerous threats from our planet. It would take a tremendous amount of kinetic energy to change the course of a giant asteroid. They do not consider using nuclear weapons, since the cure would be worse than the disease, as they say, since the rock could be divided into multiple pieces that would increase the risk of them hitting the earth’s surface. There is a more practical solution.
Their computer simulations suggest that the simultaneous impact of 23 ‘Long March 5’ rockets, weighing 900 tons each , could adequately deflect the asteroid Bennu about 10,000 kilometers from its course.
The spacecraft would have to travel for almost three years to reach its goal. On top of each rocket would be a deflector, a device designed to avoid breaking the asteroid. Each rocket would “hit” the asteroid, one after the other, by means of a gentle push, managing to change its course slightly and deflect it enough to pass safely through our planet.
“Asteroid collisions pose a great threat to all life on Earth,” explains Mingtao Li, lead author of the article published in Icarus magazine. “And it is possible to defend against large asteroids with a nuclear-weapon-free technique within ten years.”
Could China one day save the world?
At the moment, the probability that a 100-meter-wide asteroid will hit Earth in the next 100 years is 1%, a figure to take into account. For an asteroid the size of Bennu (classified by the US space agency NASA as a potentially dangerous space rock), given its dimensions, that number drops even further: to 0.1%.
And the United States?
The American nation is also planning a similar project called HAMMER (Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response), which would send more rockets to Bennu (between 34 and 53) and make the trip faster; it would only take two years to reach the asteroid. However, this plan is significantly more expensive and would take longer to prepare.
Referencia: Yirui Wang, Mingtao Li, Zizheng Gong, Jianming Wang, Chuankui Wang, Binghong Zhou, Assembled kinetic impactor for deflecting asteroids by combining the spacecraft with the launch vehicle upper stage, Icarus, Volume 368, 2021, 114596, ISSN 0019-1035, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114596.
