SALT LAKE CITY — A moment of silence for (simulated) New York City, the site of a (simulated) asteroid strike.
Thank you.
During the recent annual IAA Planetary Defense Conference, NASA, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency and other organizations from around the world ran a simulation last week featuring an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. However, their actions had dire potential consequences, Gizmodo reports.
After determining a 600-foot-wide asteroid with a one in 50,000 chance of hitting the Earth would, in fact, touch down in Denver, Colorado, hard enough to vaporize the entire city, they began using kinetic impactors to change the rock’s trajectory. However, the scientists weren’t out of the woods yet.
After repelling the asteroid, it was discovered a 200-foot chunk had broken off and would hit New York City in Central Park. Without enough time to respond, most of the city’s boroughs — including a portion of New Jersey — was evacuated before the inevitable destruction, according to Gizmodo.
Again, it’s worth mentioning again this exercise was just a simulation showing one possible outcome. According to NBC News, the impact would have been 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and would have caused 1.3 million deaths. But Gizmodo notes the odds of this actually happening in real life are miniscule.
We previously reported on NASA’s practice of running these simulations. The “tabletop exercises” have been run for several years and each one is different.
Rüdiger Jehn, the European Space Agency’s head of Planetary Defence, said before the conference that advanced warning and preparation through simulations could help prevent real asteroids from hitting the planet.
For more nitty-gritty details, the ESA has a blog post featuring daily updates from the conference.