Asteroid headed toward Earth? NASA simulation explores how the nation might respond

NPR
By Nell Greenfieldboyce
Published June 21, 2024 at 2:00 AM PDT



Asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as seen by NASA's DART spacecraft 11 seconds before the impact that shifted its path through space, in the first test of asteroid deflection.
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / NASA


Imagine if scientists discovered a giant asteroid with a 72% chance of hitting the Earth in about 14 years — a space rock so big that it could not only take out a city but devastate a whole region.

This is the hypothetical scenario that asteroid experts, NASA workers, federal emergency management officials, and their international partners recently discussed as part of a table-top simulation designed to improve the nation’s ability to respond to future asteroid threats, according to a report [pdf] just released by the space agency.

[...]

This event was just the latest in a series of drills that planetary defense experts have held every couple of years to practice how they’d handle news of a potentially planet-menacing asteroid — and it’s the first since NASA’s DART mission, which showed that ramming a spacecraft into an asteroid could change its path through space.

This time around, just after the fictional asteroid’s discovery, scientists estimated its size to be anywhere from 60 meters to almost 800 meters across.

[...]