There will be room for a few cubesats, too.ĪIM will launch out towards a near-Earth asteroid called Didymos. It's expected to carry some cameras and radar and communications gear and stuff like that, and also a boxy little lander based on DLR’s MASCOT. The AIM observatory, which will be launched first, won't be hugely complicated or expensive. It has two primary components: an observatory called AIM (Asteroid Impact Mission) being developed by ESA, and an impactor called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) being developed by NASA. The AIDA mission has a similar structure to Deep Impact. In 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft launched a 370-kilogram copper-cored impact vehicle at the 6-km-wide comet Tempel-1, and then hung back to watch the show. The objective of this mission is awesome: to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid with as much force as possible, and see what happens.Īs you may remember, this is not the first time that we’ve deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid just to see what would happen. The European Space Agency and NASA have a good understanding of the importance of finding and (hopefully) avoiding asteroids, and they’re joining forces on an Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment mission called AIDA. But really, what it means is this: if we can agree that it makes sense to allocate resources towards reducing the risk of people getting killed by things in proportion to the likelihood of those things actually occuring, then asteroid detection and intervention is definitely worth our attention. That 1 in 75,000 means that you're almost twice as likely to die from a globally destructive asteroid impact as you are from either an earthquake or a lightning strike.ĭoes this mean we should panic? I mean, sure, go ahead, if you’ll feel better afterwards. The odds of you personally getting killed by an asteroid are not that high: About 1 in 75,000 seems to be a reasonably accurate number based on available data. The thing about asteroids, though, is that while it’s very unlikely that Earth is going to be hit by one capable of doing significant damage, if it does happen, it’s going to trigger bad times for a lot of people-millions, if not billions.
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