NASA paid me a billion {dollars} to cease asteroid crashing into Earth

The most harmful rock in our photo voltaic system is asteroid Bennu.

With a diameter in regards to the peak of the Empire State Building, it’s as huge as an plane provider. Reflecting solely a tiny fraction of the daylight that shines upon its floor, it is usually one of many darkest objects in our photo voltaic system. Most different asteroids mirror 5 occasions as a lot.

On September 24, 2182, if humanity takes no steps to forestall it and the chances line up, it can hit the floor of the Earth at a velocity of Mach 36, or 27,000 miles per hour — a freight practice crashing into the planet.

In this occasion, humanity will face a tough selection: start planning to evacuate a large area of the world or launch a mission to knock the asteroid from its path. Either means, we’ll have to know all we are able to about Bennu.

In 2011, NASA awarded me a billion {dollars} to perform simply that. The mission would come to ivolve not solely sending a spacecraft to the asteroid however bringing a chunk of it again to Earth.

It is a narrative 4 and a half billion years within the making.

Bennu was found on September 11, 1999, by scientists on the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, an entity tasked with maintaining a tally of the sky, looking for potential threats from each international nations and the interstellar abyss.

It was of rapid curiosity as a result of its darkish floor steered a carbon-rich composition, which means it’s a uncommon sort of asteroid that might present a wealth of data in regards to the important elements of life and the foundations for a liveable world.

Billions of years in the past, others like it could have delivered the chemical substances that make up the biomolecules in our cells, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. 

Today, scientists are curious about Bennu due to the key risk it poses.

If it hits Earth, its path will blaze by means of the environment many occasions brighter than the noon solar. The impression will launch a blast of power equal to 1,450 megatons of TNT. To put that in perspective, the entire power expended throughout all nuclear testing all through historical past is estimated to be 510 megatons.

Bennu’s crash touchdown would triple that immediately.

In some respects, the Earth would hardly register such an occasion: the orbit and axis would stay unperturbed. In different respects — arguably extra pertinent ones — the results can be devastating. 

Bennu’s impression would create a crater 4 miles huge and half a mile deep. It would set off a magnitude-6.7 earthquake.

Approximately 15 seconds after impression, areas inside tens of miles of the crater would expertise an air blast pushed by Bennu’s hypersonic path by means of the environment and big power launch on the floor. The wind can be 20 occasions extra highly effective than a Category 5 hurricane.

The sound wave can be louder than an orchestra of air-raid sirens, blaring from each course.

Curious onlookers who flocked to their home windows to view the fireball can be greeted with a barrage of fragments because the glass imploded.

Residential properties can be flattened, the few survivors decided by location and random luck. Office buildings and freeway bridges would twist, distort, and finally collapse. Trees can be blown down; people who someway managed to stay upright can be stripped of their branches and leaves.

After one other 15 seconds — nonetheless properly underneath a minute after Bennu’s preliminary impression — fragments of earth and rock that had been violently excavated would rain down upon this broken space. The largest rocks that Bennu despatched flying can be the dimensions of 16-story buildings.

In the aftermath, energy outages, meals and water shortages, and communication blackouts would final months because the area remained inaccessible.

In quick, a Bennu impression can be a serious pure and humanitarian catastrophe. Most of the injury can be concentrated inside tens of miles of the impression web site, however there can be catastrophic outcomes for a whole bunch of miles.

If the asteroid struck a serious inhabitants heart, the lack of life can be staggering.

Bennu’s orbit brings it extraordinarily near our planet. It is that this proximity that offers us an opportunity to find out whether or not we must always put together for catastrophe.

Twenty-one years after its discovery, in October 2020, we had been about to search out out.

My tiny crew was assembled within the Lockheed Martin mission management heart in Colorado, every of us sporting our blue NASA polos, able to witness both the success or failure of OSIRIS-REx – the primary ever US mission to gather a pattern from an asteroid.

The room was divided into two sections — one the place the engineers sat in entrance of screens watching the continuous trickle of data arriving from house, and one other arrange like a tv set, with a Bennu backdrop and a bunch to interview a revolving solid of mission employees.

Broadcast started at 3pm native time, and shortly, greater than one million individuals had been tuned in to observe us make historical past.

I used to be a bundle of nerves, attempting to maintain observe of the wall clock whereas listening to the mission controller learn out the essential milestones.

Out in house, OSIRIS-REx started its remaining descent, approaching the floor at a gentle tempo of 4 inches per second. It expertly focused the guts of Nightingale – the location that had been chosen for a pattern choice due to the quantity of unobstructed fine-grained materials it accommodates.

With its smallest antenna in view of the Earth, it dribbled data again to the management room. The 18-minute time warp that’s communication throughout the photo voltaic system meant that each jiffy, a brand new knowledge level would come down from OSIRIS-REx relaying the occasions of the previous.

I hungrily consumed each informational bread crumb. An hour in, we obtained the essential callout: ‘MatchPoint burn is complete.’

This milestone meant the spacecraft had fired its thrusters to gradual its descent and sync up with the asteroid’s rotation. It then continued a treacherous 11-minute coast over Mount Doom (a nickname we’d given this treacherous boulder the dimensions of a two-story constructing) concentrating on a transparent spot the dimensions of a small car parking zone in a crater on a pile of rubble that had been cruising by means of the photo voltaic system for a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of years.

It’s already occurred, I assumed to myself. Did OSIRIS-REx go for it?

On the opposite aspect of the Sun, OSIRIS-REx hovered above its goal. Its laptop continued to course of NavCam knowledge, analyzing every pixel because the floor options turned higher resolved. With every snapshot, it ran calculations, weighing the chances of reaching a inexperienced zone or contacting a purple location. Its destiny and the essential resolution to proceed or retreat was in its personal arms.

As it closed in on the floor, the second of fact approached. At a spread of simply 16 toes, OSIRIS-REx analyzed the ultimate photographs, contemplating all its choices, earlier than making its resolution. It then transmitted its selection again to Earth, the place we had been ready to search out out what had occurred 18 minutes previously.

For the primary time in my life, I spotted the true enormity of the photo voltaic system, and it was huge past comprehension. Now my nerves had been displaying. I knew I used to be talking quickly and respiratory closely. It felt like the entire world was watching me freak out in actual time.

Three minutes later we heard the callout: ‘Attitude control system has transitioned to touch-and-go mode.’

Our data in regards to the remaining essential resolution was solely moments away.

‘OREx is descending below 25 meters [82 feet].’

In the previous couple of moments earlier than contact, I reminded our host that the five-meter crossing is the essential second when OSIRIS-REx makes the go-no-go resolution.

‘All my senses are on that callout right now,’ I instructed her.

The subsequent callout got here throughout the speaker.

‘OREx has processed its next image, position uncertainty is 0.5 meters [one-foot].’

I may hear the crew erupt in cheers.

‘Hazard probability is zero percent.’

My coronary heart began hammering in my chest. I knew at that second that OSIRIS-REx had gone in. All that was left was for the info to make its means throughout the photo voltaic system.

The video feed converted to the management room. I stared on the display screen, sustaining my concentrate on the crew, anxiously awaiting the following callout.

My gaze targeted on Estelle, who was monitoring the telemetry from Bennu. She can be the primary to know that OSIRIS-REx had touched down. Everyone else’s eyes had been on her as properly. Her backbone straight, each every so often she flicked her arms, as if shaking water from them, the one signal that she could also be as nervous as the remainder of us.

My coronary heart was pounding. Sixteen years of labor got here down to those perilous few seconds.

After an eternity, the decision lastly got here by means of.

‘OREx has descended below the five-meter mark. Contact expected in 50 seconds.’

I used to be performed with the printed. I made one parting comment to the host – ‘We’re getting into!’ – after which I used to be out of there. Without one other phrase, I squeezed previous the Bennu backdrop of the soundstage and ran over to be with my crew.

On my means over to the management room, I heard the essential callout.

‘Touchdown declared.’

I assumed in regards to the lengthy, winding path to this second, starting with my lonely childhood spent staring up right into a darkish desert sky, the 1000’s of people that had labored throughout the planet to make this mission occur.

I considered my household again in Tucson, watching me on tv in the course of the largest second of my profession.

And in fact, I considered OSIRIS-REx, on their lonesome on Bennu.

All directly, Estelle sprang from her chair, threw her gold-spangled wrists within the air in a way that may make an NFL referee proud, and yelled the phrases I had waited for therefore lengthy to listen to:

‘We have touchdown!’

Constrained by the well being tips, we reached out our arms to one another and slapped digital excessive fives, the ache of the separation muted solely by the magnitude of our accomplishment.

A chunk of primordial rock that had witnessed our photo voltaic system’s lengthy historical past could now be able to return house for generations of scientific discovery, and I couldn’t wait to see what got here subsequent.

Excerpted from The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System by Dante Lauretta, reprinted by permission from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group