Planetary defence

A good planetary defence system will probably take a century to build, but at least we are moving from theory to practical experiments.

Illustration of the DART spacecraft approaching the Dimorphos and Didymos asteroids. The biggest asteroid to hit the planet, Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula 66 million years ago, was 10 kilometres in diameter. It caused the last great extinction: the world-wide firestorms and the five- or 10-year ‘asteroid winter’ that followed (due to the ash blocking out the sun) killed off all the non-avian dinosaurs and let the mammals take over, writes Gwynne Dyer. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

September 22, 2022

LONDON, U.K.—On Sept. 26, about eleven million kilometres from Earth, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will make the first attempt to divert an asteroid from its orbit. But forget ‘Don’t Look Up,' ‘Deep Impact,' ‘Armageddon’ and all the other movies about pla...

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