Happy Nice Mall

Movies that imagine an asteroid or comet catastrophically crashing into Earth always have a key scene: A lone astronomer notices the erratic clump of space shooting toward us, causing panic and a heightened sense of existential fear as the researcher tells the wider world.

On March 11, life began to imitate art. That evening, at the Piszkéstető Mountain Station of the Konkoly Observatory near Budapest, Krisztian Sarneczky He was looking at the stars. Dissatisfied with discovering 63 near-Earth asteroids throughout his career, he sought and succeeded in finding his 64th asteroid.

At first, the object he saw looked normal. “It wasn’t unusually fast,” said Mr. Sárneczky. “It wasn’t unusually bright.” Half an hour later, he realized that his “movement was faster. That’s when I noticed that he was rapidly approaching us.”

This might sound like the start of a melodramatic disaster movie, but the asteroid was just over a meter and a half long—a non-threatening squeak. And Mr. Sárneczky felt happy.

“I have dreamed of such a discovery many times, but it seemed impossible,” he said.

Not only had he spied on a new asteroid, he had detected one just before it crashed into planet Earth, only the fifth time such a discovery has been made so far. The object is named after 2022 EB5It might have been harmless, but it’s been a good test of the tools NASA has built to protect our planet and its inhabitants from a collision with a more menacing rock from outer space.

Such a system Scout is software using astronomers’ observations of near-Earth objects and calculating approximately where and when their effects might occur. One hour after the 2022 EB5 was detected, Mr. Sárneczky shared his data and it was quickly analyzed by Scout. Although the 2022 EB5 will crash into Earth just two hours after its discovery, the software has managed to calculate that it will enter the atmosphere off the east coast of Greenland. And at 17:23 ET on March 11, it did just that, it exploded in midair.

“It was a wonderful hour and a half in my life,” said Mr Sárneczky.

Although EB5 is scanty, an asteroid doesn’t need to jump very large to become a threat. 55 meter rock It exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013.e.g. released an equivalent explosion 470 kilotons of TNTsmashed thousands of windows, injuring 1,200 people. The fact that the Scout can accurately chart the orbit of a smaller asteroid offers a kind of reassurance. If detected in sufficient time, a city that encounters a Chelyabinsk-like space rock in the future could at least be warned.

It normally takes several days of observation to confirm the existence and identity of a new asteroid. But if this object turns out to be a small but dangerous space rock about to crash into Earth, deciding to wait for that extra data first could have disastrous consequences. “That’s why we developed Scout,” he said. Davide Farnocchiais a navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which developed the program, and went on the air in 2017.

Scout constantly looks at the data sent by. Minor Planet CenterA clearinghouse in Cambridge, Mass. that notes the discoveries and locations of small space objects. Dr. The software then “try to figure out if something is right on Earth,” Farnocchia said.

It was up to both skill and luck that Mr. Sárneczky was the first to spot 2022 EB5: He is an experienced asteroid hunter who stumbled upon the right place on Earth to spot the object on his journey to Earth. And its efficiency allowed the Scout to shift into gear. Within the first hour of making his observations, Mr. Sárneczky processed his images, double-checked the object’s coordinates, and sent everything to the Minor Planet Center.

Using 14 observations taken in 40 minutes by a single astronomer, the Scout right guess Time and place of 2022 EB5’s encounter with Earth’s atmosphere. There was no one around to see him, but a weather satellite recorded his last moment: a temporary flame that is quickly consumed by the night.

This isn’t Scout’s first successful prediction. In 2018, another tiny Earth-bound asteroid was discovered 8.5 hours before impact. The Scout accurately determined its trajectory, which proved important to meteorite hunters. the remaining two dozen pieces At the Central Kalahari Game Reserve full of lions in Botswana.

For 2022 EB5 this will not be possible.

“Unfortunately it landed in the sea north of Iceland, so we won’t be able to recover the meteorites,” he said. Paul ChodasD., director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Dr. Chodas said we shouldn’t worry as this asteroid was detected only two hours before its arrival.

“Small asteroids impact Earth quite often, more than once a year for this size,” he said. And their size means that their effects are typically inconclusive. Dr. “Don’t worry about the little things,” said Chodas.

This Scout continues to show its worth. But if that program or NASA’s other near-Earth object tracking systems detect a much larger asteroid heading toward us, it won’t be too comfortable, because Earth currently lacks ways to protect itself.

A global effort is underway to change this. Scientists are investigating how nuclear weapons It can deflect or destroy threatening space rocks. And later this year, Double Asteroid Redirect Test, A NASA space mission will crash into an asteroid in an attempt to change its orbit around the sun – a dry run for the day when we really need to get an asteroid out of Earth’s path.

But such efforts will mean nothing if we remain unaware of the locations of potentially dangerous asteroids. And in this context, there are still so many unknowns known.

Although scientists suspect most of the near-Earth asteroids large enough to cause worldwide destruction have been detected, a handful may still be hiding behind the sun.

More relevant are the near-Earth asteroids, which are about 460 feet in diameter, in the tens of thousands. They can create explosions that flatten the city “bigger than any nuclear test ever done”. Megan Bruck SyalA planetary defense researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Dr. And astronomers now estimate they’ve found about half of them.

Dr. Even an asteroid hitting Earth just 160 feet away was “still a really bad day,” Bruck Syal said. such a rock It erupted in Siberia in 1908 and flattened 800 square miles of forest.. “This is still 1,000 times more energy than the Hiroshima explosion.” And perhaps only 9 percent of near-Earth objects in this size range have been detected.

Fortunately, two new telescopes are likely to help with this task in the coming years: giant optics. Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile and space-based infrared Near-Earth Object Researcher observatory Both are sensitive enough to potentially find 90 percent of urban killers at 460 feet or greater. Dr. “No matter how good our capabilities are right now, we need this next generation of surveys,” Chodas said.

The hope is that time is on our side. The probability of a city-destroying asteroid hitting Earth is about 1 percent per century – low, but not comfortably low.

Dr. “We don’t know when the next effect will be,” Chodas said. Will our planetary defense system be fully operational before that dark day comes?