NASA astronomers and programmers have created an "asteroid attack" early warning system that can almost certainly detect any asteroid approaching dangerously close range five days before it reaches Earth, Universe Today reported.
In the past few decades, scientists around the world have been actively monitoring near-Earth asteroids and conducting a kind of space census, trying to understand how dangerous they are for humanity. There are so many asteroids in near-Earth space that astronomers had to create special scales to estimate how likely they are to fall to Earth.
Despite all this and the huge number of asteroids discovered in recent years using ground-based telescopes and the WISE infrared orbital observatory, many large asteroids and countless smaller objects the size of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which fell to Earth in February 2013, remain undiscovered. humanity.
As NASA reported back in 2011 at the first presentation of the NEOWISE catalog, today only five thousand asteroids are known about a hundred meters in size, while their total number is estimated at several tens of thousands. The number of smaller objects within the main asteroid belt can be even larger and reach a million.
For this reason, NASA, Roscosmos and other space agencies are actively working on the development of asteroid detection systems even before approaching the Earth, and are thinking about creating means of "space defense".
The first of its kind was the Scout system, developed by NASA and successfully tested in late October and early November. Using the automatic telescope PAN-STARRS, she was able to detect asteroid 2016 UR36 five days before its approach to the planet, calculate its diameter - from 5 to 25 meters - and determine the distance to which it will approach - about 1.3 distances between the Moon and The ground.
Five days may seem too short a time, not enough even to send a mission with Bruce Willis to a potentially dangerous asteroid, but earlier scientists could see such a space "killer" only a couple of hours before it fell to Earth. In five days, at least, it is possible to assess the consequences of the fall and take appropriate measures to save the inhabitants of the zone where it falls.
In 2018, NASA will launch a brood of NEA Scout microsatellites into orbit to help the ground scout fill in the gaps in knowledge about asteroids like Chelyabinsk. When such an object approaches the Earth, one of the probes will fly up to it, take detailed pictures of its surface, and also "touch" it to study the structure of the interior and its chemical composition.
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