NASA Planning Asteroid Impact Exercise Next Week

Aimed at effective disaster management, NASA and its international partners are planning to participate in an exercise that will play out a realistic - but fictional - scenario of an asteroid on an impact trajectory with Earth.

The scenario begins with the fictional premise that on March 26, astronomers "discovered" a NEO they consider potentially hazardous to Earth.

After a "few months" of tracking, observers predict that this near-Earth object (NEO) - dubbed 2019 PDC - poses a 1 in 100 chance of impact with Earth in 2027 (in real life, the international community has decided that a 1 in 100 chance of impact is the threshold for action).

Participants in this exercise will discuss potential preparations for asteroid reconnaissance and deflection missions and planning for mitigation of a potential impact's effects, NASA said.

Scientists believe that these exercises can help people in the planetary defence community to understand what those on the disaster management side need to know.

"This exercise will help us develop more effective communications with each other and with our governments," Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defence Officer, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Better communication of the hazards posed by NEOs such as asteroids or comets has been a top priority for international groups, such as NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), the European Space Agency's Space Situational Awareness-NEO Segment and the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN).

Developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS), the asteroid impact exercise next week is scheduled to take place at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference to be held in the US from April 29 to May 3.

NASA's PDCO and other US agencies and space science institutions, along with international partners, will participate in the exercise, the US space agency said.

Next week's exercise events will occur over the five days of the conference, with exercise leaders briefing participants on the status of the scenario at the end of each day and soliciting response ideas and feedback, based on the latest fictional data, NASA said.