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China announces plans for a new asteroid-deflecting mission

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China’s house company plans to ship a spacecraft to slam into an asteroid, knocking it into a brand new — and hopefully safer — orbit. The possible new mission will launch inside the subsequent 4 years, and was introduced on Sunday by Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China Nationwide House Administration, in response to World Occasions, a state-run information outlet.

The nation hasn’t but decided which asteroid to focus on. The mission was introduced as one half of a bigger new planetary protection effort, which can search to catalog and monitor near-Earth asteroids, particularly those who may pose a menace to our planet. The hassle would come with a brand new warning system as properly. Finally, the plan is to determine an asteroid which may threaten Earth, and ship a spacecraft to crash into it, altering its orbit within the course of. However it’s nonetheless very early days, and the general mission has not been formally accepted but — it’s “being reviewed for approval,” World Occasions stories.

The thought does seem to have been circulating for some time. Again in January, a white paper revealed by Chinese language officers talked about plans to review a planetary protection system, and final October, the nation hosted a planetary protection convention, Andrew Jones reported for House Information. The planetary protection mission would additionally arrange software program to simulate asteroid impacts, and would run rehearsals of what to do within the occasion of a possible impression. (NASA and the European House Company have held comparable simulations.)

NASA has its personal asteroid-redirecting mission, which took off in November. However the company isn’t concentrating on any doubtlessly threatening house rocks simply but. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Take a look at (DART) is aiming for the tiny moonlet of an asteroid referred to as Didymos. It should attempt to knock the house rock, referred to as Dimorphos, off-course on September 26, 2022. Information from that impression may assist inform future planetary protection efforts — simply in case they’re ever wanted sooner or later.

Small house rocks hit our planet day-after-day, raining down as meteorites and dirt. It’s the larger rocks that house businesses like CNSA and NASA are extra nervous about. Efforts to catalog near-earth objects have already discovered and tracked the overwhelming majority of enormous (larger than 1 km) asteroids in our neighborhood. However smaller asteroids may nonetheless be catastrophic — and efforts to determine and observe these chunks of rock are nonetheless ongoing. That’s why China, the US, and plenty of different nations are excited by planetary protection — everybody desires to know not solely what’s coming, however find out how to cease it when it does.



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