[meteorite-list] Space Agencies Team Up Against Killer Asteroids (AIDA)

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nasa-mission-asteroid-earth-collide_560d3cc1e4b0dd85030ae919

Space Agencies Team Up Against Killer Asteroids

"To protect Earth from potentially hazardous impacts, we need to understand 
asteroids much better."

Nadya Agrawal
The Huffington Post
October 2, 2015

NASA and the European Space Agency are joining forces with other institutions 
to launch a program that will test their ability to pull off a major task: 
Prevent asteroids from hitting Earth. 

Asteroids have been crashing into the Earth for billions of years and 
have been disastrous in the past, like when an asteroid ushered the extinction 
of the dinosaurs. And though we're not currently in danger of being struck 
by a massive space rock, scientists have been toying with lots of ideas 
to prevent threatening asteroids from hitting Earth.

One of these ideas has given birth to the Asteroid Impact & Deflection 
Assessment program, under which two spacecraft will be launched at a binary 
asteroid that orbits near the Earth. One will nudge the rock to see if 
its orbit can be changed while the other will study the makeup of the 
asteroid itself.  

The idea behind the program is to determine whether kinetic energy can 
be used to divert an asteroid from colliding with Earth. Or, more simply 
put, NASA and the ESA are trying to see if it is possible to bump an asteroid 
off course.

"To protect Earth from potentially hazardous impacts, we need to understand 
asteroids much better -- what they are made of, their structure, origins 
and how they respond to collisions," Dr. Patrick Michel, lead investigator 
for the ESA, told scientists at the European Planetary Science Congress. 
"AIDA will be the first mission to study an asteroid binary system, as 
well as the first to test whether we can deflect an asteroid through an 
impact with a spacecraft." 

A practice run of the potentially world-saving mission is set for May 
2022, when the binary asteroids Didymoon and Didymos orbit close to Earth. 
 AIDA crafts will be launched 18 months earlier, in October 2020, to meet 
the asteroids. Not only does will AIDA aim to see if an asteroid can be 
diverted, but it will also study the makeup of the rock itself. 

The two-part mission is split between NASA and the ESA. For the first 
part of the program, the ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission will send a small 
lander to Didymoon to measure its internal structure and density through 
radar waves.   

For the second part of the program, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection 
Test spacecraft, steered by ESA's lander, will slam into the center of 
Didymoon. Since Didymoon orbits the much larger Didymos, scientists hope 
that the impact will shift both asteroids.  

Though Didymoon is only 525 feet wide, if AIDA is successful, the same 
principle should still apply to much larger, and actually threatening 
asteroids.