NASA and its plan to deflect an asteroid in 2022

When we think of asteroids come to our imagination big moles of stone that stalk the Earth, and in part it is, but those rocks that roam space are also a source of scientific and technological wealth.

Raising public awareness of the opportunities and challenges that these objects represent is the mission of the Asteroid day, which is celebrated every June 30, date in which, in 1908, a meteorite caused serious damage in Tunguska (Siberia), where it swept 2,000 square meters of taiga.

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Asteroids are the remains of the birth of the planets of the solar system and many are fragments of tiny protoplanets that never reached maturity, so their study is vital for understand the origin of our home in the universe.

“I see them as a source of scientific and technological wealth,” says the astrophysicist. Josep Maria Wheat, of the Institute of Space Sciences of the CSIC and of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia.

More than 75% of asteroids are chondritic type. Amalgams of the original materials that condensed around the Sun 4.565 million years ago and -explains- “contain the fossil remains of those early times, being rich in metals rare earths and, some of them, even in the primordial water“.

This year is special, because in December the return of the Japanese probe Hayabusa 2 who, after six years of mission, will return with fragments of Ryugu, an asteroid from 900 meters in diameter located 280 million kilometers from Earth.

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When the pieces can be examined, it is hoped to obtain “a plethora of information“, as it happened with the samples that Hayabusa brought from the asteroide Itokawa a decade ago, says Wheat, whose team was the only Spanish who could examine them and aspires to do the same with those of Ryugu.

But this is not the only asteroid that can be analyzed, because in three years should return the mission Osiris Rex from NASA with material from Bennu.

These two missions are an “exciting” moment, in the words of Javier Licandro, from the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics (IAC), that last week he participated in one of the virtual talks organized by the European Space Agency (ESA) on the occasion of Asteroid Day.

Hayabusa 2 and Osiris Rex are “side quests” that “are already giving surprising results“, he pointed Licandro and he explained that on the surface of the asteroids it was expected that there would be a lot of dust, but in reality they are “basically a scree”, which made it difficult to find a place for the Japanese probe to land.

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Meteorites, fragments of rocky bodies reaching EarthThey can also contribute to the exploration of Mars, Wheat highlights.

In the analysis of ALH 84001 Martian meteorite, about 4.1 billion years old and discovered in Antarctica in 1984, the Wheat team found evidence of water.

This is just one example of the meteorites that every year they enter our atmosphere, where they are normally destroyed, although some overcome that barrier and fall to the land. The most famous is Chicxulub, which 66 million years ago hit the gulf of Mexico and killed the dinosaurs.

And it is that “the dinosaurs did not have a space agency” that guarded space, as recalled by an ancient and ironic slogan of the THAT printed on some of their shirts.

The risk of such a rock reaching Earth is not great, but there are many other smaller and potentially dangerousThat is why there are identification and monitoring programs, and planetary defense projects are being launched.

In the past two decades “tremendous progress has been made” in identification of asteroids in the near-Earth region, Wheat highlights, but the important thing now is to complete the search for those small objects.

75% of the objects in a kilometer and 300 meters in diameter, but between 300 and 100 meters we know only 15%, a percentage that drops to 0.5% for those between 100 and 30 meters, adds the astronomer, who highlights that the Tunguska meteorite is believed to have been no more than 50 meters .

But will it be possible one day to deflect an asteroid that threatens Earth? That’s him objective of ESA’s planetary defense missions and NASA, which have their sights set on the asteroid Didymos, orbited by a smaller one named Dimorphos, whose size is similar to an Egyptian pyramid.

To this binary asteroid system it will travel, in two years, the NASA DART probe, which will make a hyper velocity kinetic impact against Dimorphos to try to vary its speed and deflect its course. “This seems like the most consistent technique to apply with these little asteroids.“, considers Wheat.

Two years later, ESA’s Hera probe will visit “that fascinating binary system, to characterize both bodies and check the effects caused by the impact“.

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