We all know this tale: an asteroid falls to Earth - and everyone dies. The only living thing that can survive the nuclear winter will be small, fluffy and, probably, underground. Like dinosaurs 65 million years ago, humans will have no chance. And this brings us to the latest NASA project: we capture one of these giant drifting stones and send us somersault towards the Earth. What are they just thinking about?
“The target now is probably 2008 EZ5,” says Humberto Campins, planetary scientist and project consultant. “Nice name, very poetic,” laughs.
The object in question is an asteroid so large that Tyrannosaurs would roll over in their grave upon learning of it. It was opened in 2008 (as the name implies) and is 230 to 710 meters across. If it hit our planet, it would be shaken by an explosion, a million times stronger than that caused by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
But do not rush to run into the mountains. In fact, NASA has no plans to tow an entire asteroid - and it certainly does not intend to bring fiery death to the surface of the Earth. Instead, the plan is to pull the 20-tonne boulder off its surface and push it into the moon's orbit.
(Of course, this is not the only asteroid-related mission we are planning.)
Just so you know, in six missions from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Apollo astronauts brought 382 kilograms of lunar rocks to Earth. This is roughly equivalent to the weight of a large brown bear. The new mission will ram a rock the size of two adult Tyrannosaurs (excuse me) - 50 times that size - in one go.
Add to this the fact that the selected asteroid is traveling at a speed of 90,000 kilometers per hour and is usually located 470 million kilometers from us - and you can feel the beauty of the project. How were they going to pull it? And for what?
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Asteroids are believed to be remnants from the formation of our solar system; While most of the drifting rocks eventually collided and formed planets, some have escaped this fate and have now orbited the Sun for the past five billion years.
Near-Earth asteroids are those with erratic orbits that swim close - sometimes dangerously close - to us. Over the past thousand years, not a single person has died from the asteroid, and in the next hundred years not a single major object will visit the Earth, but there are ancient Chinese records of such deaths, and in 1908 an asteroid sternly cleaned out a piece of land the size of Luxembourg in the desolate Siberian taiga …
“They have fallen before and will fall again if we don’t interfere,” says Campins.
This intimacy also has disadvantages. Last year, scientists watched as an asteroid loaded with $ 5 trillion of platinum whizzed past Earth, 300 million kilometers away. There is growing interest from private companies in the development of these celestial storerooms, and NASA has a special purpose: water.
Some asteroids are mostly metal, while others are C-type asteroids of carbon mixed with water.
“If we want to grow in the solar system, astronauts of the future could use asteroids as fueling stations for water and oxygen,” says Paul Hodas, manager of NASA's Near Earth Objects Center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
But there is one problem. At the moment, most of the asteroids are a complete mystery to us. We don't even know what they look like, let alone what they are made of.
“When we look at asteroids through a telescope, we only see points of light. We don't see the rocks because they are too far away,”says Ed Clautis, an asteroid expert at the University of Winnipeg.
Instead, scientists must only make assumptions by looking at the sunlight reflected by asteroids. It's like holding coal in one hand and a piece of shiny metal in the other. It's easy to tell the sheen of metal from the blackness of charcoal just by looking. But to understand what exactly is in the coal, you have to carry it to the laboratory.
"We assume there is a combination of dust and rock, but we don't know the exact relationship on the selected asteroid," Campins says.
Even if the asteroids turn out to be full of water, there is another obstacle. Although astronauts are permanently aboard the International Space Station, no astronaut has gone into deep space since the last moon landing in 1972 - and even then, the mission lasted no more than a few days. At the moment, astronauts are dependent on Earth supplies and operational support. If NASA plans to send humans to Mars in the mid-2030s - this is the current plan - it will have to develop radically new technology.
And for that, the agency needs an asteroid redirection mission. By pulling a boulder out of deep space and parking it conveniently close to Earth, the project will solve three problems in one fell swoop.
The first phase of the mission will involve sending a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid. It was designed with three legs that it would place around the boulder and several mechanical arms to grab it. This part is pretty straightforward, according to Khodas. The gravitational pull on asteroids is very low, so the landing will be smooth.
After selecting a boulder, the mission will test the concept of a "gravity tractor" - a technique that involves using the spacecraft's mass (which will increase due to the boulder) to gently tow an object (asteroid). Since the gravitational force acting on the spacecraft is negligible, it can have a tangible effect on the trajectory of the asteroid. It will also move the asteroid in a less dangerous direction for Earth.
The spacecraft will bounce and rise so as not to kick up clouds of dust with the engines when it is at a safe distance. Dust can blind the spacecraft's cameras if done too early. And then he will have to travel 80 million kilometers to the moon. It is during this journey that NASA's latest technology will come in handy. Solar energy converted to electricity will propel xenon - the gas used in plasma screens, strobe lights and camera flashes - to burst from the engines and provide sustained thrust. Even light thrust will provide constant acceleration, since there is no friction in the vacuum.
The asteroid mission is the perfect testing ground for this technology, which NASA hopes to one day use to send astronauts to Mars. It has not yet been used on such a scale.
ILYA KHEL