Asteroids are hurtling toward Earth, but scientists aren’t tracking them – yet

What would we do if an asteroid was hurtling toward Earth?

“You simply run into it with a spacecraft. You don’t need Bruce Willis,” former astronaut and co-founder of the B612 Foundation, Dr. Ed Lu, told KIRO Radio’s Morning News before an announcement at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. His foundation is dedicated to preventing asteroids from crashing into Earth.

Since 2001, the Earth has experienced 26 atom bomb-sized explosions from asteroids. They were detected by a network designed to discover if countries are testing nuclear weapons. It turns out no one has tested an atom bomb in 13 years. Those explosions were from asteroids crashing into Earth.

Lu says the largest asteroids, the world-ending apocalyptic ones, are being tracked by telescope. But asteroids that are just a little bit smaller, the much more common ones that would maybe destroy something the size of a large city, aren’t being tracked at all.

“Right now, if you think about what current strategy is for dealing with the problem, these things happen randomly around the Earth. We’re basically relying on blind luck,” says Lu. “We’re not seeing these things beforehand so we realize that we can do better.”

The asteroids are only about 150 feet across, but when they crash to Earth, they’re moving at Mach 50 to Mach 100.

Lu says most of the damage is done by the explosion and its after effects.

“It’s the shock wave that kills you. That kills and destroys things. So most of these particular things (the 25 other recorded asteroid impacts) are small enough at high altitude that they didn’t cause as much ground damage, not like the Chelyabinsk did.”

The Chelyabinsk meteor seriously injured about 1,500 people in Russia last year, mostly by the shock wave that followed the meteor.

According to Lu, the Chelyabinsk meteor was 30 times the size of the Hiroshima explosion, but there was less damage because it exploded while still traveling through our atmosphere.

The hard part is actually finding the asteroids because they’re small and millions of miles away. It’s not NASA’s priority to detect these smaller asteroids, according to Lu.

But with the right tools, like B612’s Sentinel, scientists can track them.

“That’s the amazing thing,” says Lu. “I want people to realize the amazing things that people and technology can do. These (asteroids) are black, against a black sky, 10 million miles away, but you can see it with an infrared telescope, which is what we’re building. It’s called Sentinel and it’s launching in 2018.”

Seeing these asteroids is the first step, but preventing them from hitting Earth doesn’t take Bruce Willis.

All you need to do, says Lu, is simply run into the asteroid with a spacecraft when it’s still millions of miles away from Earth, to send it off course.

The Sentinel project is being built privately and B612 is looking to fund it. They’re hoping that the announcement made Tuesday at Seattle’s Museum of Flight will encourage people to fund their preventive project. “People can donate online, but in the same way the ballet raises money or the opera raises money, people can talk to us,” he says, and kick in a hundred bucks to save the Earth.