This week, an asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmosphere and exploded in a ball of fire above Siberia.
From the time the space rock was spotted by NASA to the time it hit Earth, space agencies around the world had just seven hours to react.
Luckily for Earth, this asteroid was only 70cm across and burned up harmlessly in the air – but for asteroid hunter Franck Marchis, this was too close for comfort.
Dr Marchis, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and founder of the UNISTELLAR citizen astronomer network, told MailOnline: ‘If it had been slightly bigger, that would been a very different story.’
While institutes like NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) keep a close watch for any space rocks that threaten Earth, there simply aren’t enough people watching the sky to catch everything.
If scientists want to save humanity from a potential ‘city killer’ asteroid we need years of warning, not a handful of hours.
The solution, according to Dr Marchis, is to enlist amateur astronomers to fill in the gaps left behind by the professionals.
Dr Marchis says: ‘Asteroids can come at any moment towards Earth. Having eyes on the sky everywhere in the world allows us to track them.’
Professional asteroid hunter Franck Marchis says that governmental space agencies like NASA and ESA can’t protect Earth from an impending asteroid impact alone
Franck Marchis (pictured) senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and founder of UNISTELLAR, told MailOnline that the only way to protect Earth from asteroids is for civilians to spot the threats that NASA misses
What’s the risk of an asteroid hitting Earth?
On Christmas Day, 2004, while most of us were busy opening presents and enjoying time with our families, Dr Marchis was facing down a potentially deadly threat.
NASA had spotted a large space rock, known as a Near-Earth Object (NEO), and sent out a call for astronomers to take a closer look.
After taking measurements of the asteroid’s course and calculating its orbit, Dr Marchis and other astronomers came to the sobering realisation that it was headed right for Earth.
At around 400m in diameter, the asteroid, known as 2004 MN4, was a true city killer capable of punching through the atmosphere and hitting the planet with devastating force.
To make matters worse, Dr Marchis predicted that there were only four to seven hours before impact.
He says: ‘The community was freaked out, for several hours we had no idea if it was going to hit the planet or not.’
Thankfully, it turned out that the initial observations had been wrong and 2004 MN4 merely skimmed by the planet without colliding.
Just like the film ‘Don’t Look Up’, on Christmas Day 2004, Dr Marchis detected an asteroid that was predicted to collide with Earth. However, unlike the film, Dr Marchis spotted the 400m-long space rock when there were only four hours before it was expected to hit
This week an asteroid exploded over Russia. The asteroid was discovered early Tuesday morning by a NASA-funded telescope only seven hours before it hit the atmosphere
However, for seven hours on Christmas Day, there were only about 400 people in the world who knew just how close Earth had come to total disaster.
He says: ‘I think when you see something like that, you realise that this is possible and you realise the potential impact of it.’
Each day, the Earth is bombarded by an estimated 100 tonnes of material from space, most of which are no larger than a grain of dust and burn up harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere.
However, astronomers have discovered 36,765 NEOs, including more than 11,000 which are over 140m across and 868 larger than a kilometre.
Of those, 1,714 are on the ‘risk list’ meaning that there is a non-zero chance of a collision with Earth.
With space around Earth so full of potential threats, near misses are not entirely uncommon.
Last year a 130m-wide space rock named 2019 OK travelling at 88,500 kmph (55,000 mph) passed within just 72,500 km (45,000 miles) of Earth – extraordinarily close in astronomical terms.
Nor do asteroids need to be as large as 2003 MN4 to cause absolute devastation.
In 2004, Dr Marchis detected the asteroid 400m-wide 2004 MN4. At the time, calculations suggested it may hit Earth within hours of its discovery
The Chelyabinsk meteor (pictured) which injured over 1,600 and damaged over 7,000 buildings in 2013 was believed to be just 18m in diameter.
For instance, the Chelyabinsk meteor which injured over 1,600 and damaged over 7,000 buildings in 2013 was believed to be just 18m in diameter.
Dr Marchis says: ‘An asteroid of over 120 metres will impact our planet every 10,000 years on average.
‘This shows that, if we want our civilisation to last for a long period of time, we need to look around us and characterise those objects.’
How can we save Earth from a devastating asteroid impact?
After the Christmas Day scare, Dr Marchis says he realised that small groups of professionals simply weren’t up to the task of defending the entire planet.
‘There are multiple stations around the world, professional telescopes, that detect and characterise objects but most of them are located in the same area,’ Dr Marchis says.
‘It means that if an asteroid is coming to us from over Japan or Russia there is nobody looking in this direction, so we still have what we call dark zones.’
The novel solution was that, instead of having a handful of massive advanced systems, you could fill the dark zones with small, cheap telescopes to watch the whole sky at once.
Dr Marchis’ initial plan was to place a series of small satellite telescopes in orbit (pictured) to detect incoming asteroids. However, this was deemed too expensive
Dr Marchis says: ‘We quickly realised that having an entire worldwide array of telescopes capable of watching all of the sky all of the time would help.’
Back in 2014, Dr Marchis thought that the best way to do this would be to surround the planet with a network of orbiting telescope satellites.
However, before the days of reusable rockets, nobody was interested in funding a vast satellite constellation and Dr Marchis now calls the idea his ‘sci-fi’ project.
Unable to put his telescopes in space, Dr Marchis ultimately settled on the next best thing: putting them in as many homes around the world as physically possible.
In 2015, he founded UNISTELLAR which makes relatively cheap telescopes ‘smart telescopes’ which can track objects in space and share their measurements with a network of amateur astronomers.
These observations allow average civilians to light up the world’s dark zones and keep a watchful eye on anything that could pose a threat to Earth.
When NASA or ESA’s wide-angle telescopes spot something bright and fast moving through the sky they send a notification to a database called the Minor Planets Centre.
Dr Marchis says: ‘Based on about five or six observations they tell other people: “Hey, there is an asteroid coming to us and it could be potentially hazardous.”
Instead of going to space, Dr Marchis founded Unistellar which sells telescopes (pictured) that automatically share data on the objects they observe with a network of amateur astronomers. This allows scientists to gather lots of observations of potentially hazardous objects
‘Amateur astronomers including those in our network get this notification and use our telescopes to refine the observation.
‘It’s by combining all those eyes together that refines the predicted orbit of the asteroid and confirms whether it is an asteroid rather than a piece of rocket.’
In the case of spotting a dangerous asteroid, the impact will first be confirmed by NASA’s Sentry and ESA’s Meerkat prediction systems.
Then Dr Marchis and the other members of UNISTELLAR would bring their predictions to the UN’s International Asteroid Warning Network to coordinate the response.
This was exactly what happened with the asteroid COWECP5 which dramatically exploded over Russia this week.
The asteroid was spotted by a NASA-funded telescope in Arizona about seven hours prior to impact.
Amateur astronomers in Japan and Australia then used their smaller telescopes to work out exactly where and when it would hit.
This time, it was determined that the space rock would burn up in the atmosphere so the issue was not escalated to the UN but, if it had been bigger, it would have been these citizen scientists’ observations which determined the areas to be evacuated.
The Earth frequently faces near misses from hazardous asteroids. This year four ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroids passed Earth within a 12-hour window. The largest was the ‘city killer’ asteroid 2002 NV16 which is taller than the Blackpool Tower
The future of planetary defence
However, if humanity is to survive into the future, we need to do more than just know when Earth is about to be hit by an asteroid – we need a way of stopping it.
‘The good news is that, two years ago, we made an experiment showing that we can deflect an asteroid if we know well in advance that such an impact will happen,’ Dr Marchis says.
‘And that’s changing a lot about how we think about this problem.’
The experiment Dr Marchis refers to is NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) which slammed a fast-moving satellite into the side of a distant asteroid.
Although the results will be confirmed in 2026 by ESA’s Hera mission, the early results show that the asteroid was indeed bumped out of its orbit.
And, as the satellite collided with its target, it was telescopes in the UNISTELLAR network that recorded the impact as it happened.
These observations provided the first images of the plumes of dust and debris caused by the collision which showed that the $324.5 million (£253.5 million) mission had been a success.
NASA’s DART mission used a small fast-moving satellite to slam into a massive asteroid. This test showed that it is possible to knock an asteroid out of a collision course with Earth
Dr Marchis says that he wants to expand the amateur astronomer network to detect potential targets for deflection missions. Projects like the DART mission (pictured) could be a vital line of defence against space rocks but only if there is enough prior warning
It was even the hard work of citizen scientists which provided the data that proved humanity really could push a dangerous asteroid out of the way.
Dr Marchis says that the goal is now to expand the UNISTELLAR network so that amateur astronomers can start to identify any asteroids that could pose a threat.
He says: ‘What we need to do is map the entire surroundings of Earth to find all those bodies 120m or larger because, as soon as we know that one of them could impact our planet, we just have to send a spacecraft over to deflect it.
‘We do more observations in a year now than we have done over the past 200 years but we could still do better.’
For example, there are still vast dark zones over the developing countries where Earth just can’t see what is coming its way.
Dr Marchis says that the only solution is to either ‘win the lottery’ to fund his satellite telescopes or get more amateur astronomers involved in planetary defence.
He concludes: ‘If people like astronomy or if they want to do something more meaningful in their life they should really look at what we do in citizen science.
‘This is a movement which is going to change the way we progress as a civilisation and UNISTELLAR is proof that every human can make remarkable discoveries that will one day change humanity.’
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .