Humanity is not yet able to defend against a potentially dangerous asteroid for the Earth, but now we are moving in the right direction, said US Presidential Advisor for Science and Space John Holdren, speaking at a briefing at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
“We are not fully prepared to protect the Earth from the asteroid hazard, but we are now moving rapidly in that direction. We are investing more and more resources in the search for potentially dangerous asteroids with large sizes, and recently we received a clear example of how difficult it is to solve this problem in the form of a Chelyabinsk meteorite falling,”said the astrophysicist.
According to him, the fall of even a small meteorite to Earth, which did not fall into all known hazard categories, led to an explosion with a capacity of 400-500 kilotons of TNT, which injured thousands of people and caused serious economic damage.
“The Chelyabinsk meteorite and the Tunguska meteorite of 1906 showed that the falls of such objects are extremely rare, but they occur - once in a hundred and a thousand years. We were lucky with the Tunguska meteorite, and there is no guarantee that such disasters will always occur over territories where there are no people. In order for our civilization to continue to exist, we must be prepared even for such rare events. Therefore, the ARM mission is aimed, among other things, at solving the problems of protecting the planet from such threats,”continued Obama's adviser.
In 2010, US President Barack Obama challenged NASA to organize an expedition to an asteroid in the first half of 2020, and to Mars in 2030. To solve this problem, NASA launched the ARM (Asteroid Redirect Mission) initiative in 2014, in which the space agency planned to visit one of the asteroids in the vicinity of the Earth, capture it or change its course of motion.
Initially, two options for its implementation were considered - Plan A, which implied the capture of a small asteroid using a special "bag" and its transportation to the orbit of the Moon, and Plan B, within which the NASA probe was supposed to land on the surface of a large asteroid, separate a fragment of its rocks from it and transport it towards the Earth.
In March last year, NASA experts decided to take the second path, as it provides more scientific advantages, including the study of the possibility of "shifting" the asteroid from the course to the collision with the Earth. In January 2016, a detailed study of the mission began with the participation of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and representatives of the private space industry.
The final design of the probe will be approved by NASA in 2018, and the competition for its development will end in 2017, according to Michel Gates, ARM project manager. While NASA has not chosen a target for ARM, however, it is likely to become a large asteroid that has not yet been studied with a high content of water and primary matter in the solar system.
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When the fragment of the asteroid is delivered to Earth orbit, NASA plans to send a manned spacecraft Orion to it, the crew of which will capture the asteroid and bring it to Earth for study. The successful completion of this venture, NASA hopes, will help to understand how ready mankind is to protect itself from "space" threats and to extract minerals from small celestial bodies of the solar system.