China will be launching a kinetic asteroid defense mission in three years as part of a bigger set of planetary shielding planning measures.
According to a SpaceNews story, the China National Space Administration's spacecraft will collide with an as-yet-unidentified possibly hazardous asteroid and attempt to modify its orbit.
China National Space Administration (CNSA) told state-owned news outlet China Central Television (CCTV) that the country is working on a planetary defense plan. It will include studies and research into technologies that humans could use to deflect near-Earth asteroids.
China Wants to Destroy An Asteroid Just Like NASA
According to the Chinese state-owned news outlet Global Times, CNSA deputy head Wu Yanhua laid down China's preliminary plans to embark on the planetary defense. Wu's remarks fell on Space Day, an annual commemoration of China's first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, which was launched in 1970.
CNSA's monitoring program will be paired with an engineering effort that includes a high thrust rocket that can carry a kinetic impactor - a payload designed to hit the target asteroid with enough force to change its orbit.
Wu said that a probe would closely investigate a near-Earth asteroid before crashing into it in the proposed test. The idea behind kinetic impaction is to change the orbital course of a dangerous asteroid by driving a massive, high-speed spaceship into it. However, the target asteroid they plan to test hasn't been announced yet.
The CNSA project is still in its early stages and is awaiting permission. According to Wu, the Chinese space agency plans to undertake the test in 2025 or 2026, which coincides with the end of China's 14th Five-Year Plan period.
According to Wu, the CNSA also intends to establish a ground-based monitoring and warning system to study and categorize potentially dangerous near-Earth objects.
The system will most likely be modeled after NASA's Sentry-II monitoring system, which analyses asteroid impact hazards automatically. According to the Global Times, software to simulate the risks posed by asteroids and tabletop exercises to practice the defensive process are already in the works.
As a significant global power, Wu said China is shouldering the burden of safeguarding the Earth with other countries. The CNSA deputy head noted that the proposed monitoring and warning system would come before the asteroid mitigation test.
NASA's Asteroid Deflecting Mission
NASA reports that it is currently tracking 28,000 near-Earth objects, with around 3,000 new ones added each year.
Hence, The Verge said the space agency launched its own asteroid-deflecting mission in November. However, they are not targeting any potentially dangerous space objects.
Vice News pointed out that Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will collide with the "moonlet" Dimorphos at 15,000 miles per hour sometime this autumn, changing its orbital track around Didymos.
If everything goes according to plan, a small satellite named LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids) will photograph the collision and its aftermath. Around 2026, the European Space Agency aims to send a follow-up mission to Didymos called Hera to assess the system's long-term transformation.
The asteroid deflection missions intend to foresee the hazard of an asteroid colliding with Earth. Since most huge objects are now being followed by scientists, it is highly improbable that Earth would encounter the kind of apocalyptic collision that took out the dinosaurs and many other species 66 million years ago.
However, a smaller object like Didymos, around half a mile in diameter, may still do massive regional devastation if it collides with our planet. While the likelihood of such a catastrophe is remote, scientists in the United States, China, and elsewhere are preparing for it by conducting tabletop exercises, cataloging as many near-Earth objects as possible, and developing new missions like DART to fine-tune our ability to steer any dangerous things off course if necessary.
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