The UN Is Getting Into the Asteroid Impact Prevention Game

Here’s some comforting news: Over 90 percent of near-Earth comets and asteroids that are bigger than a kilometer are mapped.

But the bad news is that there are still a million NEOs large enough to level a city the size of New York, and they can still catch us off guard. The Chelyabinsk meteor, after all, was only 17 to 20 meters across and mostly landed in a lake, yet it still managed to injure 1,000 people. And NASA didn’t see it coming, even though it's mapping asteroids still.

Given the global impact of a large global impact, the United Nations is stepping up and forming an International Asteroid Warning network. The network will share information from several space agencies on potentially hazardous asteroids, which the Impact Disaster Planning Advisory group will use to calculate any potential damage and plan the response.

If you’re one of those skeptical UN haters, there’s plenty of fodder for eye rolling here—this plan to form a network that informs a group is the result of 12 years of work, and took five years to be approved. But for the less cynical, the International Asteroid Warning network is evidence that a threat that was once too abstract and unimaginable is finally being taken seriously.

The main driving force behind the measure was the Association of Space Explorers. As “the only professional association for space fliers,” the ASE comprises 375 individuals who have orbited the Earth in a spacecraft at least once. It has had a committee working since 2005 to promote “global discussions aimed at a near-term capability to prevent a future damaging impact.” By their estimates, “the chances are 100% that our planet will be struck again by a large near-Earth object.”

The ASE worked with the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to come up with a way the UN can prevent death from above. In addition to the warning system mentioned above, and the General Assembly also approved of a plan to set up a “Space Missions Planning Advisory group” to work how how to deflect an Earth-bound asteroid, and put the consideration and authorization of “any necessary NEO deflection campaigns” in the hands of the UN COPUOS.

For planning and testing purposes, the ASE proposes a mission to deflect a roughly 100-meter asteroid, within a decade. “The demonstration will be a useful example of collaboration and cost-sharing in advance of a true threat,” a release suggests.

“Chelyabinsk was bad luck,” said former astronaut Ed Lu. Lu formed a non-profit called B612 that aims to launch an asteroid-hunting satellite and also serves on the ASE’s committee on NEOs. He talked to Scientific American and warned, “If we get hit again 20 years from now, that is not bad luck—that’s stupidity.”

Don’t sweat it, Ed. The UN is on it.