Inside NASA’s preparations for a “Don’t Look Up” scenario

A Mount Everest-sized asteroid made a close fly-by of Earth yesterday, marking one of the largest space rocks to pass near our planet within the past 125 years.

• The massive asteroid wasn’t in any danger of striking Earth, passing by at a distance 17x farther than our Moon (4+ million miles).
• But if it had made impact with our planet, experts say the level of destruction would have been civilization-ending.

NASA has been hard at work preparing for this possibility. While research shows a planet-killing asteroid isn’t expected to threaten Earth for at least the next 1,000 years, NASA recently conducted an exercise to gauge America’s readiness in the hypothetical event that a massive space rock is bearing down on our planet.

This theoretical exercise, which involved a group of ~100 US government representatives, saw participants craft a plan for dealing with the “discovery” of a giant asteroid carrying a 72% chance of hitting Earth in 2038.

After discussing the options, US officials expressed a clear preference for one of two immediate courses of action:

1. Launch a US spacecraft to fly by the asteroid and gather more information about its size, composition, and long-term trajectory.
2. Enlist global partners to build a more expensive spacecraft that can spend extended time around the asteroid, and possibly change its path through space using methods learned from NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

Unlike NASA’s previous asteroid-threat simulations, which played out to a dramatic ending, the agency’s latest exercise remained focused on the time period shortly after the hypothetical asteroid’s discovery.

👀 Looking ahead.. NASA says it will publish a complete after-action report on its asteroid impact exercise at a later date.