2009 VA: Asteroid Nearly Hits Earth

by Jordan Yerman | November 12, 2009 at 10:53 am

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Asteroid 2009 VA came within 9,000 miles of Earth on November 6. Earlier today, Fox News covered the story using footage from Armageddon, which is a bit sensationalist, to say the least, as Asteroid 2009 VA was only 23 feet wide and would have burnt up in the atmosphere before striking the ground. Humanity would have been safe. Also, Deep Impact was a way better asteroid flick. In celestial terms, 9,000 miles is pretty close (it's within the orbit of most satellites).

NASA and other space agencies around the world have been keeping increasingly close track of near-Earth asteroids and comets, with a strong assist from amateur astronomers. In this case, the object was first detected by the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona. It was quickly identified by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., as a close-approaching asteroid. Then NASA experts worked out its orbit and gave the all-clear.

What, though, if NASA hadn't given it the all-clear? While last-minute finds like 2009 VA are, by definition, not dangerous due to their tiny size, the question remains: what's the protocol for when an asteroid is about to become a meteor? We can't really just ring up Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, and they're not real space-drillers anyway. That was make-believe. Turns out that there isn't a real protocol for how to deal with a potentially dangerous asteroid-to-be. Who "owns" the problem: Is it NASA's responsibility? The USA? Russia?

NASA has actually addressed this:

The new office will increase financial support for the detection and characterization of Near Earth Objects (NEOs). It will work with other groups in the United States and abroad to create an inventory of NEOs. One of its goals will be to identify asteroids at sizes down to 1 km in diameter.

So far, no potentially-dangerous Near Earth Objects (NEOs) detected have an impact probability high enought to motivate a comprehensive strategy: 1 in 45,000 (.0022%), the most-likely impact listed, is long odds indeed.

More troublesome is the threat of smaller asteroids, greater than 460 feet in diameter (about one-seventh the threshold of the really scary big ones), that could devastate a region but not the whole globe. NASA estimates that some 20,000 of these might be potentially hazardous; it has identified only a fraction of them. Two years ago Congress asked NASA to propose new search programs and to analyze ways to divert any asteroids on a collision course with Earth. The agency did that in a March report to Congress, but it balked at the notion of spending up to $1 billion or more to build search instruments or spacecraft.