A theoretical mission to avoid an asteroid that is directed directly to the Earth is full of sufficient risk to write a Michael Bay movie. Instead of the emotions of the Armageddon, such as a malfunction drill or a president with a kid with itchy trigger, a new investigation suggests that one of the biggest risks to face an anti -airoid operation would be a “eye of gravitational lock” that sends the rock back to the earth on a later date.
The work stood out in the Joint meeting of the Europanet Sciences Congress and the Planetary Sciences Division (EPSC-DPS) in Helsinki.
“Even if we intentionally move away from an asteroid of the Earth with a space mission, we must ensure that it does not deviate in one of these key holes later. Otherwise, we would face the same threat of impact again on the line,” he said Rahil Makadiaa space technology researcher at the University of Illinois in Urbano-Champaign who presented the findings, in a Press release.
Read more: A murderer asteroid of the city will not damage the land, but you can hit the moon in its place
How Dart broke an asteroid
In 2022, fiction came true when NASA organized a mission to intercept an asteroid. His double asteroid redirection test (Dart) crashed into the small asteroid Dimorphs, which orbit another asteroid called Didimos to about 7 million miles from the earth. While none of the asteroids was in a collision course with our world, the study was a success. He showed that an impact could successfully alter the path of a flying space rock, which increases the hopes that any object of land can be sent in a new course by future missions.
Makadia’s new work suggests that in any potentially deadly scenario, such redirection should consider the risk of placing the rock in a so -called lock eye. This is a small area of space where the severity of a planet adjusts the path of an asteroid that passes in a way that makes it return to the planet from a new angle years later. In this way, a mission similar to a dart that pushes an asteroid in an eye of gravitational lock does not avoid danger, but only delays it.
The challenge for any future mission is to find a sweet point on the side of an asteroid that permanently sends it to a vacuum instead of in a mission of return to the earth. The Makadia team has developed a tool to predict the route of a deviant asteroid, based on Dart’s processed information.
Find the perfect attack site
The technique incorporates a significant amount of information. The general form, the mass and the rotation of the asteroid, together with topological details such as craters or hills, are taken into account in the analysis. Although Dart’s information is useful, since each possible threat of asteroids will have its own unique structure, these details would be collected again through a recognition mission before the redirection. If an asteroid that is approaching quickly does not give the earth the opportunity to verify its contours with a spacecraft, Makadia said that the analysis can be performed from the surface of the earth.
The details of the asteroid can be processed to determine the probable trajectory of the asteroid after impact, which allows researchers to identify a perfect attack location.
“With these probability maps, we can remove asteroids while we prevent them from returning in an impact trajectory, protecting the land in the long term,” Makadia concluded in a press release.
Read more: Asteroid mining provides companies with the search for rare metals
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