During the 2017 International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) Planetary Defense Conference currently going on in Tokyo, US-based firm The Aerospace Corporation (Aerospace) will lead an asteroid impact threat exercise.
Headed by Dr. William Ailor, Aerospace Fellow at Aerospace, who has conducted three such exercises to date, this event will give conference attendees the opportunity to examine the various options for deflecting a potential threat.
This year’s threat exercise was developed by a team of specialists from Aerospace, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In this exercise, a hypothetical scenario will be enacted, in which fictional asteroid “2017 PDC” is discovered, that can potentially crash into our planet in the year 2027.
The exercise is based on realistic assumptions, such as the lack of data on the asteroid’s physical properties, and utilizes existing tools such as Google Earth as well as a variety of apps developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
Aerospace, the co-sponsor of the conference, began exploring asteroid impact threats in 2003, after a challenge given by the U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center.
“Astronomers began a serious effort looking for asteroid and comet strikes in the late 1990s,” said Ailor. “Since then, observers have discovered more than 600 objects that have a small, but very low probability of hitting Earth this century.”
This is the fifth Planetary Defense Conference organized by the IAA, which brings together global experts and space agency leaders, and is the first to be held in Asia.
