China’s space agency is planning to send a spacecraft to collide with an asteroid, pushing it into a new orbit — and it hopes it’s safer. The highly anticipated new mission will be launched within the next four years, according to Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China National Space Administration as reported by the Global Times.
The country has not yet determined which asteroid to target, and the mission has been announced as part of a larger new planetary defense effort, which will seek to classify and monitor near-Earth asteroids, especially those that may pose a threat to our planet.
Efforts will also include a new warning system. The plan is to identify an asteroid that may threaten Earth, send a spacecraft to crash it, and change its orbit in the process, but it’s still too early, and the project as a whole hasn’t been formally approved yet — “being reviewed for approval.” , according to The Verege, citing Global Times reports.
The idea seems to have been around for a while. In January, a white paper published by Chinese officials suggested plans to study a planetary defense system, and last October, the country hosted a Planetary Defense Conference, Andrew Jones reported for Space News. The Planetary Defense Project will also create an asteroid collision simulation program, and will conduct training on what to do in the event of a potential impact.
NASA has its own asteroid redirection mission, which launched in November. But the agency has not yet targeted any potentially threatened space rocks. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) aims to create a small moon of an asteroid called Didymos.
It will attempt to destroy a space rock, called Dimorphos, off course on September 26, 2022, and data from this impact could help guide future planetary defense efforts — just in case it’s needed in the future.
Small space rocks that hit our planet every day, raining like meteorites and dust, are the bigger rocks that worry space agencies like CNSA and NASA. NEO cataloging efforts have found and tracked the vast majority of large asteroids (greater than 1 kilometer) in our vicinity.
But smaller asteroids are still catastrophic — and efforts to locate and track those bits of rock are still ongoing. That is why China, the United States, and many other countries are interested in global defense.