Humans vs. Asteroids: Mitigating Risk and Expanding Opportunities

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Featured Speakers:

Marina Brozovic, Physicist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

The sixth event in the Life Beyond Earth series on ThinkND featured Marina Brozovic, physicist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Brozovic joined to discuss her work as a radar scientist and an orbital dynamicist and how her research influences projects like NASA’s New Horizons mission to the dwarf planet Pluto, where she served on the Hazards Team. Her lecture focused primarily on the risks and opportunities associated with asteroids on humanity and Earth itself.

Brozovic began with a brief history on the discovery of asteroids in recent years. In the last 30 years, she said, researchers went from naming about 10,000 asteroids to one million in our solar system. Out of these millions of asteroids, eight percent are potentially hazardous to Earth in some way. The worldwide concern with potential asteroids hitting Earth was fueled by the collision of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994. This collision took an observable, physical toll on Jupiter, which made people wonder what could happen to Earth if a similar event occurred in the future. According to Brozovic, a collision of this size on Earth would demonstrate the fragility of Earth.

After this collision, NASA was tasked with cataloging asteroids and other objects near the Earth’s surface. In all of NASA’s research so far, no worrisome object has been discovered. However, we know that not every potentially dangerous object has been discovered. The discovery and research being invested in asteroids is continually growing, according to Brozovic. Both public and private space companies and researchers are putting time and energy into this type of research. Though Brozovic said, research surrounding asteroid mining has a long way to go before it is a profitable industry.

The end of the discussion was opened for questions from attendees. Questions ranged from the future of asteroid mining, the likelihood of an asteroid destroying Earth, the plan to counteract or recover from it, and the prevalence of women in space research and STEM fields.

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Key Takeaways:

In the last 30 years, researchers have discovered nearly one million asteroids in the solar system, 3:15.
About eight percent of asteroids are potentially hazardous, 4:00.
The collision of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 led NASA to begin cataloging asteroids in our solar system, 6:30.
Research surrounding asteroid mining has a long way to go before it is a profitable industry, 47:00.

Key Quotes and time stamps

“If something a mile-wide were to impact Earth, this would be a really bad day. So much dust would be kicked up in the atmosphere, significantly reducing the sunlight which would affect plant life and then trigger a chain reaction affecting humans.” — Marina Brozovic, 5:50
“Our knowledge about the number of objects grew in the past 30 years because NASA started to invest significantly into the discovery of asteroids. In 30 years, we’ve gone from having discovered less than 10,000 objects in the main belt to, now, we have identified more than one million.” — Marina Brozovic, 3:15
“If we are to have profitable mining of asteroids one day, we need to develop a lot more technology.” — Marina Brozovic, 50:00