Sometimes Hollywood is out earlier than NASA. As in the 1998 movie Armageddon with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck. Then an asteroid the size of Texas is on a collision course with Earth. Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis starred in Armageddon. Photo: BRUCE WEAVER / AFP Of course, it’s not good – and the only thing that can save humanity is for NASA to send Harry S. Stamper, played by Bruce Willis, to try to destroy the threat. You almost have to see for yourself how it goes. Now, 24 years later, NASA is actually going to do almost the same thing as in Armageddon. NASA calls it planetary defense Tonight, Norwegian time, a satellite will crash into a 140-metre asteroid named Dimorphos. The satellite, which was launched 11 months ago, weighs 570 kilograms and will hit at a speed of 22,000 kilometers per hour. It has now flown 11 million kilometers away from Earth. The purpose is to find out if it is possible to change the asteroid’s orbit. For those who are particularly interested, it is possible to follow the event directly here. NASA itself calls it planetary defense. – The biggest difference from Armageddon is that this asteroid is not on a collision course with Earth, reassures Yngvild Linnea Andalsvik. She is head of space monitoring at the Norwegian Space Centre, and one of those who will stay up tonight to follow the drama live. – It is the first time this has been done, she says. The asteroid threat is one of the few natural disasters we can predict, says the specialist. – So it is important that we get some tests done before we possibly discover an asteroid that will hit the Earth. – Many undiscovered asteroids But how big is the chance that a large asteroid will hit the Earth? In 2005, NASA received a mandate from Congress to find 90 percent of the near-Earth asteroids that are large enough to destroy a city – those that are 140 meters or wider in diameter, writes the New York Times. But Congress never gave NASA the money to finish—so the task is only half done—with about 15,000 more such asteroids left to discover. – You have good control over the very largest asteroids – and the very smallest ones are not too dangerous – but it is the ones in between that you are most worried about, says Andalsvik. She says that the researchers have made good calculations of the asteroids that are already known and their trajectories 100 years into the future – and none of them pose any great danger. – It is those that have not yet been discovered that are the big question. 1,200 injured when meteoroid hit Russia And we don’t actually have to go back in time very many years to find a celestial body that did damage to Earth. In 2013, a meteoroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Ural region of Russia. According to the Russian authorities, around 1,200 people were injured. Russian scientists estimated that the meteorite weighed around ten tons, reports the AP news agency. The researchers also believed that the meteorite hit the atmosphere at a speed of around 54,000 kilometers per hour. The pressure wave from the fireball propagated down to the ground where there was extensive damage to buildings. A quarter of an hour after the encounter, ground tremors were also recorded in Norway. The energy released is estimated to be between 26 and 33 times the power of the American atomic bomb used against the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. WATCH THE UNIQUE VIDEOS: Here the meteorite hits Russia. Will make measurements Yngvild Linnea Andalsvik says that measurements will be made already tonight, to find out how big an impact the satellite had on Dimorphos. – But later ESA, the European Space Agency, of which Norway is a part, will send out a satellite that will make more accurate measurements. The most exciting thing now is whether the satellite manages to hit. It has an automatic navigation system that guides it towards the asteroid. – This is one of the few times where it is a good sign that you are no longer receiving signals from a satellite, concludes Andalsvik.
ttn-69
Satellite from NASA to collide with asteroid – news Nordland
