#planetary-defense

#planetary-defense

Plenty of asteroids can survive their fiery plunge through the Earth's atmosphere. If they're big enough, they can prove incredibly destructive, like the 60-foot Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over the southern Ural region in Russia in 2013, releasing a blast equivalent to 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. And in case an even larger space rock were to ever threaten humanity, we'd have to get creative to keep it from colliding with our planet.

Starting on November 27, a global team of scientists with the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) will kick off a two-month campaign to track the comet as it nears our planet. 'While it poses no threat, comet 3I/ATLAS presents a great opportunity for the IAWN community to perform an observing exercise due to its prolonged observability from Earth and high interest to the scientific community,' the UN explains on its website.

Asteroid 2024 YR4, a 220-foot (67m) 'city-killer', currently has a four per cent chance of hitting the moon on 22 December 2032. However, fresh observations could mean the odds of a collision rise to as high as 30 per cent. If the massive asteroid does hit the moon, it could carve out a 0.6-mile-wide crater and shower Earth with lunar shrapnel.

"Given how important it would be to make the right call... there's no legal framework or agreement on the decision making protocol for what the response would be?"

This is a remarkable opportunity," said Bobby Braun, who leads space exploration for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an interview. "From a probability standpoint, there's not going to be another chance to study a killer asteroid like this for thousands of years.