Earlier this month, obscured in all the fighting over President Trump’s tweets, Iran’s seizure of a British tanker, and the emergency on the border, most of America missed the news that we all got a reprieve from a 100-foot-wide space rock. The rock in question is known as 2006 QV89, and while the reprieve is nice, there’s something to keep in mind: We still have no clue where it is.
The reprieve came because we didn’t see the asteroid where it would have been had the thing been on a collision course. All that we have in terms of figuring out this thing’s location is 10 days of tracking data going back to when we found that rock 13 years ago. Even though this asteroid is a baby in terms of size, depending on density, it could have had an impact with the force of a 550-kiloton nuclear warhead according to Purdue University’s Impact Earth calculator.
To put that into perspective, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had about a 15-kiloton yield.
Drop 2006 QV89 on Washington, D.C., and well, there arguably is no more Washington, D.C. While many people want to see the swamp drained, I think we are all united in that we’d prefer massive policy reform, not a 100-foot space rock destroying a major city and creating a major humanitarian disaster in the mid-Atlantic region. According to NASA’s Sentry Risk Table, this asteroid has 16 potential impacts with the Earth between 2020 and 2117.
So, what is to be done? The good news is that there are efforts to locate all near-earth objects over one kilometer in diameter. Those are rocks (and comets) that can do much more damage than 2006 QV89, and in some cases, wipe out all life on this planet. The good news is several efforts are underway on this front, and NASA reported on the discovery of very small asteroids that impacted earth in 2014 and 2018. Those asteroids were even smaller than 2006 QV89 and did little damage.
But what if the asteroid will do serious damage? Asteroid 2010 GD37 has 31 potential impacts between 2019 and 2101. While there is a very, very low probability those impacts will happen, it should be noted that this asteroid comes in at about 4,100 feet. The amount of energy released if this would hit would be 31,600 megatons — 632 times more powerful than the detonation of the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built.
There is good news: We may be further along on technology to divert or take out an incoming asteroid like that. In 2000, the NEAR-Shoemaker probe intercepted and eventually landed on the Eros asteroid. This was a scientific mission, but note that the craft was able to operate for 16 days after the landing. That would be more than long enough for a modified version of that probe packing a “physics package” from a B83 to carry out a mission to divert or destroy an asteroid.
Now, NEAR-Shoemaker took almost four years from launch until intercept of Eros. This means that we would still need a fair bit of lead time to try to divert or destroy the incoming asteroid with a modified version of that probe, but that is better than nothing. The initial NEAR-Shoemaker mission cost about $224 million. That means we could develop and build a dozen of these modified probes for less than the cost of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.
We’ve heard rhetoric from some politicians talking about how the Earth will be harmed if their agenda is not enacted immediately, if not sooner. In this case, locating asteroids and having the means to deflect or destroy them could very well be a matter of planetary life and death.
Harold Hutchison has 15 years of experience covering military issues for multiple outlets.
