NASA has told how it has spent the last month preparing for an asteroid impact.
The confession was made during the Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise – which is the fourth gathering of several space experts in recent years.
Although it was not clear whether or not the organisation is actually worried about an impending impact.
Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters, said: “While NASA has previously led and participated in simulated asteroid impact scenarios, this specific exercise marked the first time an end-to-end simulation of this type of disaster was studied, to include assessing a scenario from discovery of the asteroid impact threat through the aftermath effects of its hypothetical impact with Earth.
“An asteroid impact to our planet is potentially the only natural disaster humanity is capable of accurately predicting and preventing.
“Conducting exercises of this nature enable government stakeholders to identify and resolve potential issues before real-world actions to respond to an actual asteroid impact threat would ever be needed.”
While there are no predicted asteroid impact threats to our planet for the foreseeable future, this exercise – hosted by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland – focused extensively on United States federal and state government coordination that would be necessary to respond to such a threat should one ever be discovered.
Over the course of two days, multiple government agency officials worked through a detailed hypothetical scenario in which astronomers “discover” a simulated asteroid, designated 2022 TTX, that has a probability of impacting the Earth six months after its discovery.
As more information was revealed to exercise participants through a series of modules, it became clear the (simulated) asteroid, which is large enough to cause substantial regional damage, would indeed impact Earth near Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Specific details of the asteroid such as its size remained highly uncertain until just days before the asteroid’s simulated impact.
It mimicked how information could unfold in the real world due to limitations of current capabilities, including ground-based radar technology, which requires an object to be within relatively close proximity to Earth for current facilities to image and analyse.
It is unknown whether or not Earth was saved from the imaginary asteroid, however.
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