Space Agencies Team Up Against Killer Asteroids

NASA and the European Space Agency are joining forces with other institutions to launch a program that will test their ability to pull off a major task: Prevent asteroids from hitting Earth.  Asteroids have been crashing into the Earth for billions of years and have been disastrous in the past, like when an asteroid ushered the extinction of the dinosaurs. And though we're not currently in danger of being struck by a massive space rock, scientists have been toying with lots of ideas to prevent threatening asteroids from hitting Earth. One of these ideas has given birth to the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment program, under which two spacecraft will be launched at a binary asteroid that orbits near the Earth. One will nudge the rock to see if its orbit can be changed while the other will study the makeup of the asteroid itself.   The idea behind the program is to determine whether kinetic energy can be used to divert an asteroid from colliding with Earth. Or, more simply put, NASA and the ESA are trying to see if it is possible to bump an asteroid off course. "To protect Earth from potentially hazardous impacts, we need to understand asteroids much better -- what they are made of, their structure, origins and how they respond to collisions," Dr. Patrick Michel, lead investigator for the ESA, told scientists at the European Planetary Science Congress. "AIDA will be the first mission to study an asteroid binary system, as well ...

Source: Science - The Huffington Post - October 2, 2015 Category: Science Source Type: news