A Belfast-based astronomer is set to take part in a mission 20 years in the making to help ward off the threat of an asteroid crashing into Earth.
Professor Alan Fitzsimmons from Queen’s University Belfast is set to be at ground control for the European Space Agency’s first-ever planetary-defence mission, while the spacecraft is set to blast off from the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
“ is a critical step towards the day when humanity might need to deflect a threatening asteroid and is a great example of how science can be used to try to prevent loss of life as a result of dramatic, natural disasters,” Professor Fitzsimmons said.
“Scientists and engineers from all over the world have been involved, it’s an example of best practice in international scientific collaboration for the greater good.”
Preventing an asteroid from imminently hitting Earth was famously the plot of the 1998 film , starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck, but this mission is about warding off potential asteroid hits in the distant future.
is set to blast into deep space on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket to gather new data and insights on how to deflect asteroids which may be heading our way with potentially disastrous results.
While around 35,000 so-called “near-Earth asteroids” have been identified to date, just over 1,600 of them have been deemed large enough and passing close enough to us to be a risk.
None are anticipated to hit Earth within the next 100 years, but more are discovered each year and researchers said future asteroids could impact cities or even whole countries.
In 2022, NASA’s Dart mission hit a small asteroid moon called Dimorphus and changed its trajectory in a first-of-its-kind experiment in deflecting asteroids.
comes in to complete that experiment by measuring the mass of Dimorphus moved by Dart and what the precise effects were of its impact on the moon.
“After launch, will use a flyby of Mars next year that will place it on a trajectory to reach the asteroids at the end of 2026,” researchers said, adding that invaluable data would be collected on this 2022 mission.
“This will allow scientists to analyse in much greater detail than ever before what exactly happened in the Dart impact, in the hope that this technique of deflecting asteroids can be applied to potentially threatening asteroids in the future.”
Scientists said this would be the first planned rendezvous with a binary asteroid in the history of space research. The mission will also use the latest in European technologies in deep space, including the deployment of two shoebox-sized spacecraft to investigate the asteroids at close range.
