Armageddon


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The movie Armageddon is about a scenario where an asteroid is plummeting towards earth and NASA has to think up a quick plan to save the human race. This brings up the question of what plans does NASA have for a real world Armageddon situation. NASA in fact just recently in April of 2019 created an asteroid impact exercise to help prepare key decision makers on the "what if?" scenario. The participants discussed economical and human consequences of the impact on a densely populated area like New York City. The main point of the exercise being how they would change the trajectory of the asteroid.

On the second day of the five day exercise the NASA team details how they would use three Kinetic Impactors (KIs) to deflect the asteroid causing it to bypass earth. Kinetic Impactors are large spacecrafts that are sent into the path of an object coming towards earth in order to make contact and hopefully knock it off course.


Orbit of Asteroid 2019 PDC


In the exercise the first Kinetic Impactor mission was only partially successful so the participants had to create a plan over a hypothetical five years detailing multiple recon missions and six Kinetic Impactor missions to finally reduce the chance of impact to ten percent.

Comments

  1. This is an interesting, though brief, discussion of the exercise NASA conducted in April, but I would have liked to see more discussion of the physics of how they are planning to deflect the incoming asteroid.

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