NASA Scientist Warns Civilization Is Doomed If Large Asteroid Comes Into Collision Course With Earth Because We Are Unprepared

Joseph Nuth, a NASA scientist, warned at a conference held earlier this week that humanity is very ill-prepared for a surprise strike by a civilization-ending asteroid or comet. He warned that if an asteroid large enough to cause global cataclysm were heading towards Earth “there is not a lot we can do about it at the moment.”

The scientist recommended that we take urgent steps to avert looming global disaster by building and deploying an observatory spacecraft that looks out for threatening asteroids and a ready-to-launch interceptor rocket that can be fired at short notice to deflect the asteroid.

Speaking on Monday at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, Nuth, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that although they are extremely rare, impacts by large asteroids that cause global devastation have happened in the past and could happen anytime in the future.

According to Nuth, should NASA detect an asteroid hurtling toward Earth we would be helpless to stop it simply because we have failed to prepare.

“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment.”

“They [large asteroid impacts] are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially,” Nuth said, according to The Guardian. “You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”

Scientists believe that a large asteroid impact that occurred 65 million years ago caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Nuth now warns that humanity is presently just about as helpless as the dinosaurs to ward off the looming asteroid threat to global civilization.

NASA has made significant progress cataloging near-Earth objects (NEOs), that is, asteroids and comets more than a kilometer in size and whose orbital paths around the Sun bright them close to Earth.

Although NASA estimates that its asteroid search programs have identified about 90 percent of NEOs larger than a kilometer in size, researchers acknowledge that any of the estimated 10 percent of NEOs that have not been identified still pose grave danger to Earth and that the “big one” could be lurking undetected in space, waiting to spring a surprise on us.

And although several small asteroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere every year, most burn up completely in the atmosphere before hitting the ground due to heat generated by friction with the Earth’s thick atmosphere. Such asteroids burn, creating the familiar fireball phenomenon witnessed in the sky by thousands every year.

However, space scientists acknowledge that a few smaller space rocks less than but nearly a kilometer in diameter could be very dangerous. Although they are unlikely to cause Earth-wide devastation they could cause serious regional cataclysm, including catastrophic tsunamis if they impact in the ocean close to densely populated urban areas.

Space scientists and engineers have suggested several possible techniques for deflecting a potentially hazardous asteroid. Some of the techniques being considered include kinetic impactors, ion beam deflection, and enhanced gravity tractor methods.

The ion beam deflector or Ion Beam Shepherd, as it is also called, involves modifying the orbital trajectory of a space body by shooting a beam of plasma from an ion or plasma thruster — the type used to propel spacecraft — against the surface of the asteroid to create a force that deflects the asteroid from its Earth-threatening course.

The enhanced gravity tractor method uses the gravitational field of a spacecraft or a boulder taken from the surface of the target asteroid to change its orbital path.

The kinetic impactor approach involves deflecting the asteroid from its course by launching a space vehicle that collides with the asteroid at a high velocity.

According to The Guardian, Dr. Cathy Plesko, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said that a missile with a nuclear warhead could also be used to blow up a threatening asteroid.

But she conceded that the kinetic interceptor “which is basically a giant cannonball” is safer than a missile with a nuclear warhead because blowing up an asteroid could create a large of number of smaller rocks with unpredictable trajectory

To illustrate the asteroid and comet threat to Earth, Nuth referred to a comet that brushed past Mars in 2014. Astronomers spotted the object about 22 months before it passed “within cosmic spitting distance” of Mars, according to Nuth.

The NASA expert noted that if the asteroid had been on a collision course with Earth, there is nothing we could have done within 22 months to stop it.

“If you look at the schedule for high-reliability spacecraft and launching them, it takes five years to launch a spacecraft. We had 22 months of total warning.”

Nuth then went on to propose that NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) could deploy an observer spacecraft and build a ready-to-launch interceptor rocket that could be kept in storage.

The interceptor rocket could be ready for launch within a year of warning about a threatening asteroid or comet.

Noting that the “schedule for high-reliability spacecraft and launching them… takes five years, Nuth argued that a ready-to-launch rocket “could mitigate the possibility of a sneaky asteroid coming in from a place that’s hard to observe, like from the sun.”

Nuth’s warning is the latest in a series of warnings from space experts that human civilization is under threat of an extinction level event caused by an asteroid impact, as the Daily Mail notes.

John Holden, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, warned last September that an impact that could “do a lot of damage to the Earth” could occur unexpectedly.

According to Holden, had the Chelyabinsk meteor been only slight larger it could have caused greater regional devastation and loss of lives.

“We are not fully prepared, but we are on a trajectory to get much more so,” Holden said, according to the Mail. “If we are going to be as capable a civilization as our technology allows, we need to be prepared for even those rare events, because they could to a lot of damage to the Earth.”

“This is a hazard that 65 million years ago the dinosaurs succumbed to. We have to be smarter than the dinosaurs.” he added.

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