2008 Woodie Awards
United Nations develops Armageddon-style asteroid contingency plan
Reid Cranfill
Issue date: 3/16/07 Section: World
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At the insistence of former astronauts, the UN has decided to formulate an international action plan to deal with rogue asteroids headed toward Earth. The treaty would delegate responsibilities for stopping an asteroid, set the policies for what risks could be taken to prevent a collision, and coordinate relief efforts in the event of a strike.
The very idea seems fetched from bad 90's action movies, but currently NASA is tracking 127 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that could strike the planet. Not all NEOs are large enough to destroy life on earth, but an asteroid just a few hundred meters wide could easily wipe out a major city or create an enormous tsunami.
Rather than destroy any incoming asteroid, plans call to deflect an NEO's trajectory a few degrees away from Earth.
"All you'd have to do is slow the object down just a few millimeters per second, and over time, you'd change its path enough to where it'd miss (us)," said John Yeoman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the BBC.
The asteroid, Apophis, which is due to miss the Earth just barely in 2029, could be deflected merely by having a one-ton spaceship fly beside it for 12 days. The gravity from the ship would be enough to draw the asteroid away from the earth by a planet's radius.
But such plans come with potentially disastrous political consequences. In trying to deflect Apophis from possibly hitting Seattle, NASA's plan could accidentally destroy Beijing and provoke war with China.
"It's important to understand when you start to deflect an asteroid that certain countries are going to have accept an increase in risk to their populations in order to take the risk to zero for everyone," said Dr. Russell Schweickart to the BBC.
Schweickart is an Apollo 9 astronaut and founder of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), a society of astronauts and cosmonauts that proposed the treaty to the UN. The ASE plans to have a working protocol to present to the UN by 2009.
The very idea seems fetched from bad 90's action movies, but currently NASA is tracking 127 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that could strike the planet. Not all NEOs are large enough to destroy life on earth, but an asteroid just a few hundred meters wide could easily wipe out a major city or create an enormous tsunami.
Rather than destroy any incoming asteroid, plans call to deflect an NEO's trajectory a few degrees away from Earth.
"All you'd have to do is slow the object down just a few millimeters per second, and over time, you'd change its path enough to where it'd miss (us)," said John Yeoman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the BBC.
The asteroid, Apophis, which is due to miss the Earth just barely in 2029, could be deflected merely by having a one-ton spaceship fly beside it for 12 days. The gravity from the ship would be enough to draw the asteroid away from the earth by a planet's radius.
But such plans come with potentially disastrous political consequences. In trying to deflect Apophis from possibly hitting Seattle, NASA's plan could accidentally destroy Beijing and provoke war with China.
"It's important to understand when you start to deflect an asteroid that certain countries are going to have accept an increase in risk to their populations in order to take the risk to zero for everyone," said Dr. Russell Schweickart to the BBC.
Schweickart is an Apollo 9 astronaut and founder of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), a society of astronauts and cosmonauts that proposed the treaty to the UN. The ASE plans to have a working protocol to present to the UN by 2009.
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