NASA / Goddard / University of Arizona
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured this image of asteroid Bennu in 2018. Asteroid Bennu, an 85.5 million tonne space rock, is now about 7.5 million kilometers from Earth’s orbit. Chinese space scientists plan to fire a rocket at the asteroid.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id-Scientist space China plans to fire 23 rocket ke outer space. Launch tens rocket This is done to divert the impact asteroid which has little chance of ending life on Earth one day.
Their target is asteroid named Bennu. This asteroid is a rock outer space weighing 85.5 million tons or 77.5 million metric tons which is within a distance of 4.6 million miles or 7.5 million kilometers from Earth’s orbit. Asteroid It is on a path that could snatch Earth’s orbit between the years 2175 and 2199.
Although Bennu’s chances or chances of attacking Earth are slim, which is only 1 in 2,700, asteroid It is quite large, which is as wide as the Empire State Building. That means, if asteroid If it hits Earth, it will be catastrophic.
The estimated kinetic energy of Bennu’s collision with Earth is 1,200 megatons, which is approximately 80,000 times greater than the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In comparison, stone outer space that wiped out the dinosaurs produced about 100 million megatons of energy, as quoted from Live Science.
Scientists at the Science Center space China National (National Space Science Center) calculates that 23 rocket Long March 5, each weighing 992 tons or 900 metric tons, which can push rocks outer space it will simultaneously be necessary to divert asteroid to get away from the fatal path by nearly 6,000 miles or 9,000 kilometers. This length is equivalent to 1.4 times the radius of the Earth. Their calculations are detailed in a new study published in the journal Icarus November 1st issue.
“Impact asteroid poses a grave threat to all life on Earth,” said Mingtao Li, science engineer insinyur space from the National Space Science Center in Beijing and lead author of the new study. “Bending asteroid on the trajectory of the collision is critical to mitigating this threat.”
Chinese scientists plan to avoid collision asteroid with Earth stopping asteroid this is more direct, but riskier. Similar to the atomic bomb method popularized by Bruce Willis in the film “ArmageddonThis is a film that depicts the occurrence of the threat of a meteor shower striking Earth.
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Andrzej Wojcicki / Science Photo Library
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The discourse of an asteroid about to hit Earth and human efforts to prevent it was depicted in the 1998 film Armageddon.
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What the Chinese space scientists did was similar to what Bruce Willis and his team did in the film Armageddon in the face of the threat of a meteor shower. Meteors are meteoroids that enter Earth. Meteoroids are space rocks that are usually fragments of asteroids. The meteor shower in Armageddon also comes from fragments of a giant asteroid.
This Chinese plan seems to follow similar, but slightly more expensive, proposals from the past made by the United States. The United States Space Agency (NASA) has a mission called the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response (HAMMER), which aims to send a fleet of 9-meter-tall spacecraft with a battering ram to crash the asteroid away from Earth. This NASA simulation shows that 34-53 hits from the HAMMER spacecraft, which launched 10 years before Bennu collided with Earth, would be needed to shift the asteroid.
Also Read: The Origins of Oumuamua, Suspected of Alien Ships, Finally Explained
HELMET
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China’s Long March 5B rocket launch. Now the country is planning the launch of dozens of rockets to deflect the impact of an asteroid that has little chance of ending life on Earth.
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Bennu itself is a type B asteroid, which means it contains a high amount of carbon. NASA has already sent a spacecraft, called Osiris-Rex, to take samples from the asteroid. Osiris-Rex arrived above Bennu in October 2020, floating above it long enough to collect loose pieces of the asteroid’s surface with its 10-foot (3-meter) long arm feature. Osiris-Rex is expected to return to Earth with the loot in 2023.
The Long March 5 rocket is the flagship rocket of China’s space program. The rocket has completed most of the deliveries to the Chinese space station and launched the Chinese rover to Mars and the Moon.
The rocket has caused concern in the past for its uncontrolled re-entry to Earth. In May 2021, the 22-ton or 20 metric tonne portion of the Long March 5 rocket fell to Earth. Some of its fragments caught fire and some landed in the sea near the Arabian peninsula. Earlier, in May 2020, another Long March 5 rocket fragment was believed to have hit two villages in Ivory Coast.
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