Movies that imagine an asteroid or comet catastrophically colliding with Earth always feature a key scene: a solitary astronomer spots the stray space chunk hurtling toward us, prompting panic and a growing feeling of dread as the researcher tells the wider world.
Life began to imitate art on March 11. Kriszti was looking at the stars at the Konkoly Observatory. He wanted to find his 64th asteroid, but he was not satisfied with discovering 63 near-Earth asteroids.
The object appeared normal at first. I realized it was approaching us fast.
That may sound like the beginning of a melodramatic disaster movie, but the asteroid was just over six feet long. Mr. Sárneczky was happy.
He said that he had dreamed of such a discovery many times, but it seemed impossible.
He had spied a new asteroid, and just before it hit planet Earth, he had found it, the fifth time such a discovery has ever been made. The object was a good test of the tools NASA has built to defend our planet and its inhabitants from a collision with a more menacing rock from space.
Scout is a software that uses astronomer's observations of near-Earth objects and works out where and when their impacts may occur. Within an hour, Mr. Srneczky shared his data and it was analyzed by Scout. The software was able to calculate that it would enter the atmosphere off the east coast of Greenland, even though it was going to hit Earth just two hours later. At 5:23 p.m. It exploded in the air on March 11.
It was a wonderful hour and a half in my life.
It doesn't take a big jump in size for an asteroid to become a threat. The rock that exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 caused a blast equivalent to 470 kilotons of TNT, smashing thousands of windows and injuring 1,200 people. A form of reassurance is offered by the fact that Scout can plot the trajectory of a tinier asteroid. A city with a Chelyabinsk-like space rock can be warned if spotted in sufficient time.
It takes a few days of observations to confirm the existence of a new asteroid. If that object is a space rock that is about to hit Earth, we need to wait on that extra data.
The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., has data that shows the discoveries and positions of small space objects. The software tries to figure out if something is headed for Earth.
He was the first to spot the object and he was an experienced asteroid hunter who was lucky to see it in the right place. Scout was able to kick into gear because of his efficiency. Within the first hour of making his observations, Mr.rneczky processed his images, double-checked the object's coordinates, and sent everything to the Minor Planet Center.
Scout predicted the time and place of the encounter with Earth using 14 observations taken in 40 minutes. A weather satellite recorded the last moment, but nobody was around to see it.
Scout's first successful prediction isn't this one. Another small asteroid was discovered before impact. The meteorite hunters who found two dozen fragments at the Central Kalahari Game Reserve were aided by Scout's precise trajectory.
That won't be possible in 2022.
Paul Chodas, the director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA, said that they wouldn't be able to recover the meteorites.
Dr. Chodas said we shouldn't worry that the asteroid was detected only two hours before it arrived.
He said that tiny asteroids impact the Earth more than once a year for this size. Their impacts are usually without consequence because of their size.
Scout continues to demonstrate its worth. It will be of little comfort if this program, or NASA's other near-Earth object monitoring systems, identifies a much larger asteroid.
An effort is underway to change that. Nuclear weapons could be used to destroy threatening space rocks. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test is a NASA space mission that will attempt to change an asteroid's position around the sun.
If we don't know the locations of potentially hazardous asteroids, these efforts won't mean anything. There are still many unknowns.
Although scientists suspect that most near-Earth asteroids big enough to cause worldwide destruction have been identified, a few may still be hiding behind the sun.
There are tens of thousands of near-Earth asteroids. Megan Syal, a planetary defense researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said that they can create city-flattening blasts that are larger than any nuclear test that has ever been conducted. Astronomers think they have found about half of them.
Even an asteroid just 160 feet across hitting Earth is still a really bad day. A rock exploded over Siberia in 1908, flattening 800 square miles of forest.
In the coming years, two new telescopes are likely to help with this task: the giant optical Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile and the space-based infrared Near-Earth Object Surveyor observatory. As good as our capabilities are right now, we do need these next-generation surveys.
The hope is that time will be with us. The odds of an asteroid hitting Earth are low, but not comfortable.
We don't know when the next impact will happen, according to Dr. Chodas. Will our planetary defense system be up and running before the dark day?
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