What Are Your Options When you’ve Only Got Hours or Days to Prevent an Asteroid Impact?

OCTOBER 19, 2021 BY EVAN GOUGH

Imagine a scenario where we detect an asteroid heading straight for Earth. Imagine that it will arrive in a couple of days, or worse, only a few hours. What could be done to stop it?

It might be possible to protect ourselves and the planet on such short notice. But we’d have to test and build the right infrastructure to do it.

When it comes to asteroids, humanity is engaged in a process of discovery. We send spacecraft out to visit them, and sometimes those spacecraft return samples to Earth. NASA’s Lucy mission just launched, and its mission is to visit a total of eight asteroids—one in the main asteroid belt, and seven Jupiter trojans. We’re also busy cataloguing all the asteroids we can. We want to know which ones pose a threat to Earth.

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