FIONA WILLAN, REPORTER:\u00a0As dusk falls in the WA bush the roof of the Zadko observatory rolls open, a robotic optical telescope stands ready to serve.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ASSOC. PROF DAVID COWARD, THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA:\u00a0 Ready, FA22.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We have 2025 FA22 right on target.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 The Australian arm of the International Asteroid Warning Network is gearing up to defend the planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
DAVID COWARD:\u00a0 This is a drill. Like any drill speed and timeliness is everything.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 The drill is led by NASA and the aim is to test how quickly an international team of space experts can spring into action to guard the Earth should an asteroid come dangerously close.\u00a0<\/p>\n
DAVID COWARD:\u00a0 An asteroid is a space rock, and these rocks are orbiting the sun. And every now and again one of these rocks comes close to the earth.<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 While the threat they\u2019re facing tonight isn\u2019t real, the asteroid they\u2019re preparing to track is.<\/p>\n
EVAN DILLEY, TECHNICAL OFFICER, ZADKO OBSERVATORY:\u00a0 \u00a0It’s pretty rare that something comes this close that’s this big.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The scenario put forward is that this object is going to have an 0.00001 probability of impact. That might not sound like a lot, but that’s probably about 300,000 times more probable than you winning the lottery.<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0Asteroids range in size from hundreds of kilometres in diameter to less than 10 metres. Most of the larger ones have already been discovered, it\u2019s the smaller undiscovered objects \u00a0that cause greater concern. We\u2019ve seen how they can sneak up undetected.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2013, more than 1600 people in Russia were injured when an asteroid around 20 metres in diameter exploding in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
DAVID COWARD:\u00a0 We call some of these asteroids city destroyers. So that’s what planetary defence is protecting the earth from potential city destroyers.<\/p>\n
EVAN DILLEY:\u00a0 \u00a0It is a lot of pressure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 On the other side of the country is another key player in Australia\u2019s asteroid warning team.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In Canberra, Ed Kruzins is preparing an optical telescope to track the fast-moving asteroid in the hours ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
PROFESSOR ED KRUZINS, UNSW CANBERRA:\u00a0 This is a sky map. What we\u2019ve got here is the telescope controller, I can point to a particular part of the sky for example, I’m going to point there and I can tell the telescope to slew, so it\u2019s moving right now above your head.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 Is it?\u00a0<\/p>\n
ED KRUZINS:\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 The asteroid is moving so quickly, astronomers will only have a short time to watch it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ED KRUZINS:\u00a0 It\u2019s moving at 38,000km per hour, that\u2019s ten times the speed of a rifle bullet and the size of a skyscraper moving at that speed\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 The asteroid is approaching from the south and that means Australians are among the first to spot it.<\/p>\n
The aim of this exercise is to gather as much information as possible as quickly as possible to send to NASA to help calculate its path.<\/p>\n
If it really was a risk to Earth, that early information could be vital potentially even lifesaving.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Do you get nervous, do you get excited?\u00a0<\/p>\n
ED KRUZINS:\u00a0 You want to get it right.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 And they do. In the early hours of the morning, their telescope captures the asteroid \u2013 seen here as a tiny speck among the stars.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
If optical telescopes are the eyes of space surveillance you can think of radio telescopes as the ears.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We\u2019re now at Canberra\u2019s Deep Space Communication Complex. This is owned by NASA, but it\u2019s run by Australia\u2019s national science agency, the CSIRO and its scientists are also taking part in this asteroid-tracking mission.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KEVIN FERGUSON, CANBERRA DEEP SPACE COMMUNICATION COMPLEX DIRECTOR:\u00a0 We receive information from an optical group who will be the first to notice that an asteroid is out there in space. When that object becomes a little bit closer, then the radio side of observations occur.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 These antennas are used to bounce a radio signal off the space object onto another antenna in a different location.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This can help scientists calculate its location, path, speed and composition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KEVIN FERGUSON:\u00a0 Radar will take over and give more accuracy, more data. The radar works like anything, the speed of light, we use that speed of light as our main calculation. The closer it is, the shorter it will be in time for transmit and receive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 Dr Kelly Fast runs NASA\u2019s planetary defence office from Washington DC.\u00a0<\/p>\n
DR KELLY FAST, ACTING PLANETARY DEFENSE OFFICER, NASA:\u00a0 We\u2019re almost to 40,000 known near earth asteroids that we\u2019re tracking, about 11,000 of those are over 140 metres in size, meaning they\u2019re of a size that could do regional damage should they impact. And that is something that at NASA, we\u2019re tasked by the US Congress to find and track those.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 She is also leading this global drill.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KELLY FAST:\u00a0 Well, planetary defence, it’s been said, is finding asteroids before they find us and then I like to add that it’s maybe getting asteroids before they get us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s the only natural disaster we could potentially avoid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FIONA WILLAN:\u00a0 NASA scientists have proven it\u2019s possible to reduce the risk of an impact. In 2022, they successfully pushed an asteroid off course by crashing into it with a spacecraft.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But it takes years of preparation to do this, and space agencies need to know the asteroid is coming.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So, drills like tonight’s will continue and astronomers will keep hunting for any new space threats.\u00a0<\/p>\n
DAVID COWARD:\u00a0 I think people should be confident that there’s planetary defenders out there looking after them.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FIONA WILLAN, REPORTER:\u00a0As dusk falls in the WA bush the roof of the Zadko observatory rolls open, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179953,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[24382,306,305,64,63,285,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-179952","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-asteroids","9":"tag-astronomers","10":"tag-astronomy","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-space","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}