In the movies, it’s Americans who inevitably save our planet from destruction.
But now Russia has launched a bid to protect Earth from the threat posed by doomsday space rocks, meaning it’s possible that Vladimir Putin could end up protecting humanity from dying out in an asteroid apocalypse.
Roscosmos, the Russian equivalent of Nasa, wants to work out if it’s possible to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth.
This could involve slamming a ‘kinetic impactor’ craft in the rock or using a satellite to drag it onto a new course. Nukes could also be sent into space to blow up the rocks.
A new department at Roscosmos called the Russian Centre for Celestial Bodies will be tasked with looking into space to find comets and asteroids approaching Earth.
Igor Bakaras, head of the Information and Analytical Center for Ensuring the Safety of Space Activities in Near-Earth Outer Space at Rosocosmos, said a collision with an asteroid big enough to wipe out humanity happened every million years or so
‘In the entire history of the existence of modern man (about 100,000 years), there have been no such collisions,’ he said.
He cautioned against complacency and called for more work to tackle the threat of space rocks and added: ‘At present, work in these areas is limited largely to theoretical research and the mathematical modelling of various countermeasures.’
Earlier this year, scientists said asteroids are stronger than predicted and warned that humanity could have a tough time destroying a doomsday space rock on a collision course with Earth.
They used computer simulations to see what might happen when an asteroid was blown up.
This study revealed that a huge impact would not turn a city-sized object into a harmless ‘rubble pile’, but leave it with ‘significant strength’.
The findings could have a massive influence on how our species deals with the threat posed by gigantic space rocks.
‘We are impacted fairly often by small asteroids, such as in the Chelyabinsk event a few years ago,’ said K.T. Ramesh of Johns Hopkins University.
‘It is only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat.
‘We need to have a good idea of what we should do when that time comes – and scientific efforts like this one are critical to help us make those decisions.’
Scientists are currently trying to work out what to do if an asteroid suddenly appears on the horizon.
The latest research considered what would happen if we smashed a kilometre-wide asteroid into another that’s 25-kilometres wide – which is easily big enough to wipe out life on Earth.
They found that ‘millions of cracks formed and rippled throughout the asteroid, parts of the [larger] asteroid flowed like sand, and a crater was created’ after the impact.
But after this, ‘the impacted asteroid retained significant strength because it had not cracked completely, indicating that more energy would be needed to destroy asteroids’.
This means we might find it very hard to just go up into space and nuke an asteroid, forcing us to adopt a different strategy to save our species from apocalypse space rocks.
“It may sound like science fiction but a great deal of research considers asteroid collisions,’ said Charles El Mir, lead author of a paper on the research.
‘For example, if there’s an asteroid coming at earth, are we better off breaking it into small pieces, or nudging it to go a different direction?
‘And if the latter, how much force should we hit it with to move it away without causing it to break? These are actual questions under consideration.’
The research was funded by the Nasa Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.
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