Luckily we know the existence of almost all asteroids larger than 1 km, another thing is different are the comets that come from much further away and from areas that are not so controlled, but at least the issue of large asteroids and Giants does. we have them under control and none of them are a threat to the earth in the next 100 or 200 years in the future.
But it is necessary to have a planetary defense plan and for the moment what is done until we have ships and a system to divert or destroy them is to have contingency plans and do exercises among experts to know how to actually deal with this problem, The last exercise occurred a few weeks ago, it was carried out in April and a few weeks ago on June 20, a preliminary report was issued.
This year what was proposed was the existence of a hypothetical asteroid of about 800 meters in diameter, what you see in the image is the area in which it could impact, because this type of simulation not only studies locating the asteroid, designing a plan to divert or destroy it, but also in case everything goes wrong, how to act to reduce the risks of the catastrophe, either by evacuating the population from the risk area or preparing the emergency systems to act as soon as the impact occurs.
The good thing about asteroid impacts is that they do not have radiation as happens with atomic bombs, if it fell into the sea it would cause a tsunami, these are already very important sizes, in the simulation it would pass through Mexico, Dallas, Memphis, Nesville, eh DC, for Madrid etc.
In previous simulations things did not go well and at the end of last year's drill I think part of the center of Europe was destroyed, so it is not that we are very well prepared to be able to reject an asteroid right now, although for the moment we have already made a plan which was the Dart project with which it was possible to deflect a dimorphic asteroid, an asteroid that orbits another called didymos, so we can deflect them, but prepare, a ship, prepare all the equipment.
This simulation was planned 14 years ago, which seems a little exaggerated to me, because especially now that an asteroid appeared 10 days before passing through the Earth, which there is no 14-year margin or for a comet or an asteroid from beyond Jupiter from areas that are not controlled in that case we would have little room for action, for a size like that of 800 Meter, the good thing about Comets is that the larger they are, the sooner they can be detected and then we could have many years in advance.
In the future, what we will have to have is a ship always ready to act in Earth orbit, or at a Lagrange point or in a strategic place like the moon, a ship prepared with fuel and that can be sent at any time. because within the simulation plan things were proposed that seem a little absurd to me, such as that it takes 5 years to prepare a mission to be able to send a ship to simply analyze the asteroid and other years to be able to send a ship to divert or destroy it. , that does not work like that.
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