r/space • u/ChiefLeef22 • 1d ago
[NASA] A small natural object 1.5-5 feet was predicted to impact Earth’s atmosphere northwest of Australia & safely disintegrate today, 12:14 p.m. EDT. This is only the 13th small object detected in space prior to impact. These scenarios provide an invaluable test of our planetary defense capability
https://x.com/NASASpaceAlerts/status/2096621379642622185?s=20"A small natural object 1.5-5 feet (0.5-1.5m) is predicted to impact Earth’s atmosphere just northwest of Australia and safely disintegrate today, Sept. 6, 12:14 p.m. EDT. While not a hazard, scenarios like this provide an invaluable test of our planetary defense capabilities to monitor for larger objects and predict impact threats."
"The object was first reported to the Minor Planet Center by the Catalina Sky Survey, with earlier detections by Pan-STARRS, and the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies NASA-JPL calculated its trajectory and impact location - all funded by NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. This is only the 13th small object that has been detected in space prior to impact, most from NASA’s routine planetary defense monitoring."
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u/drsprky 1d ago
Now we’ll be prepared for when the Belters start throwing rocks at us
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u/NoVikingYet 1d ago
I'm in the space subreddit so I shouldn't be surprised by a The Expanse crossover, but still fun!
Lucky for us there is no Martian stealth tech, yet...
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u/CFCYYZ 1d ago
Most asteroids probably miss
In passing, blow us a kiss
But sooner or later
There will be a crater
And that we can never dismiss
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u/PumbaKahula 1d ago
This galactic limerick probably won’t leave my brain now. Storing it for future regurgitation.
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u/TbonerT 1d ago
The article answers every question except for “when was it detected?”
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u/awidden 1d ago
The answer is: too late to do anything.
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u/mfb- 1d ago
There was no need to do anything.
It was detected hours before impact, which is enough time to warn many people to stay away from windows. The Chelyabinsk meteor mostly injured people from broken windows.
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u/awidden 1d ago
It was too late to do anything.
Nothing to do - in this case, luckily.
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u/mfb- 1d ago
Warn people to stay away from windows is certainly possible within 7 hours. You won't reach everyone, but enough to make it matter.
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u/specikk 1d ago edited 1d ago
If a big asteroid is coming to hit us, our “planetary defenses” would do fuck all. Detection is not defense.
Like what’s the actual plan if a large object is on a crash trajectory with Earth? Praying?
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u/shapplesauce 1d ago
We've successfully tested adjusting the orbit of asteroids already: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dart/
With enough forewarning, it's absolutely doable.
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u/specikk 1d ago
Yeah i’m familiar with Dart. Just feels like assembling and launching a whole spacecraft wouldn’t be able to happen in a time sensitive asteroid impact imminent kind of situation.
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u/sage-longhorn 1d ago
You'd be surprised what you can get done with the unified support of the whole world. We got to the moon in a very short timeframe with much less than that amount of support not to mention that now we already have functioning rockets that can get payloads to orbit very reliably
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u/space_snap828 1d ago
This Kurzgesagt video is a fun one on deflecting asteroids on short notice. I love the idea of bombarding an asteroid with tungsten rods (they throw in some crew in the final scenario for fun, but frankly you can ignore that because the system works without them)
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u/timshel42 1d ago
if the alternative is civilizational collapse, im sure governments would be interested in self preservation.
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u/mfb- 1d ago
The most likely deflection demand would be something like "this 100 m object comes close to Earth in 2034 and hits in 2040". We would absolutely plan a mission to deflect it in or around 2034.
If it hits in two weeks then it's too late for a deflection mission, and we should try to evacuate as many as possible.
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u/a_pompous_fool 1d ago
We slam a space ship into it diverting it away from earth, praying is to be done concurrently. If it is too close to divert then idk pray harder.
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u/specikk 1d ago edited 1d ago
We don’t have any of these “spaceships”.
I guess SpaceX could send Starship to crash into it but that’s the biggest we’ve got and it might blow up in transit before it even gets there. 🤣
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u/zbertoli 1d ago
We do. The DARY mission shower even a small ship can shift the trajectory by a significant amount.
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u/preferred-til-newops 1d ago
We're actually in the best situation we've ever been in provided we detect the threat early enough. NASA takes far too long to have a rocket ready for launch, but SpaceX and China launch rockets nearly every day. SpaceX had 170 launches in 2025 (most of them Falcon 9 or F9 heavy). Multiple rockets could be sent daily until the object is diverted or broken up small enough for our atmosphere to handle.
We really need a better detection system in orbit. As the cost to place satellites in orbit continues to come down and detection software/hardware improves it's quite likely we will soon have a network of telescopes watching our solar system for these threats.
The new Roman telescope just recently launched can view over 100x the amount of space as Hubble in the same frame. The goal with it is to detect planets transiting their suns at a significantly higher rate than Hubble ever could. This would be a similar to a network of telescopes looking at our solar system for nearby objects.
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u/space_snap828 1d ago
We probably would need to incorporate some missile defense tech because as you approach the asteroid, you need to make a ton of fine adjustments to your trajectory to hit it dead on - not quite as simple as lobbing chunks of steel at it, but again this was proven with DART to be more than possible
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u/preferred-til-newops 1d ago
We're definitely capable, put enough ballast in it and we could definitely change the trajectory. Even just slowing an incoming object down is enough to get it to miss us.
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u/space_snap828 1d ago
Yeah, definitely depends on how early we identify the threat and how large the asteroid is. At a certain size and distance, you need to get creative, like my personal favorite idea to drill into the asteroid kinetically with a series of tungsten impactors to make a hole deep enough for a payload of nukes to go off in! And obliterate the asteroid inside out. (nothing lands like the movies, everything is striking at many km/s)
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u/mfb- 1d ago
NEO Surveyor is a dedicated mission to detect potentially harmful objects. It's planned to launch next year.
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u/KaerMorhen 1d ago
That entirely depends on how soon we are able to detect such a thing. Most people assume large enough objects are all able to be tracked but there have been plenty of times a, at minimum, continent killer has passed between us and the moon or already passed through its closest approach before anyone detected it
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u/ShinyGrezz 1d ago
Any examples of this occurring that you could point me to?
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u/KaerMorhen 1d ago edited 1d ago
Here is an example of a football field sized asteroid that was a near miss in 2019
This year an asteroid roughly the size of two school buses that passed within 91,000 kilometers of Earth after being spotted just a week prior.
So my previous statement about a continent killer was inaccurate but not far off
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u/mfb- 1d ago
"Continent killer" would be larger than 1 km. We know almost all of them, Rubin will probably find the last few that we didn't discover yet. It is also expected to find more than half of all near Earth objects larger than 140 m (regional destruction, and something we could deflect with a DART-like mission). NEO Surveyor is planned to launch next year, it'll improve the situation further (2/3 of all near Earth objects over 140 m).
There is also ATLAS, designed to find objects shortly before impact. Not enough to launch a deflection mission, but likely enough to evacuate the impact site for a larger object.
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u/zbertoli 1d ago
The plan has already been tested. The DART mission showed we can redirect asteroids by slamming a satellite into it. We would need some heads up, but that's the plan.
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u/watduhdamhell 1d ago
Woa there space cowboy, take a step back.
You wanna tell me how we defend ourselves from a thing before we figure out how to detect it?
It's a step in the right direction. Our improving ability to track tiny asteroids BEFORE they strike is progress from missing much, much bigger ones after they have ALREADY passed us, believe it or not. This is good.
Combine this with DART missions and we have all the necessary pieces to actually defend ourselves when the time comes. Like, as long as we have some time, I think earth stands a good chance. Like, it would be more likely to succeed than fail by a decent margin. But maybe I'm wrong.
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u/TheCornjuring 1d ago
We have various ideas. If we have enough time and if the asteroid isn’t too big, we can build a spacecraft capable of implementing a deflection mechanism.
Those are both very big “ifs”, of course, so we should probably fund a handful of specific deflection techniques and have them ready to go at any time, but the risk is low enough that there’s probably not gonna be enough political will anytime soon to have a little Earth Defense Fleet of gravity tractors and impactors hanging out in orbit or whatever. We did at least try testing kinetic deflection with the DART mission (albeit a very minor deflection against a very small asteroid), so that’s something, but it would probably be smart to do more.
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u/fwankfwort_turd 1d ago
We get Musk to send a shuttle full of salt of the earth, rough around the edges but lovable oil drillers to go and blow it up.
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u/Lazylion2 1d ago
🎵I don't wanna close my eyes I don't wanna to fall asleep 'Cause I'd miss you baby 🎵
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u/rocketsocks 1d ago
There's actually a very complete plan for if that happens, it's the KYAGB contingency.
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u/iqisoverrated 1d ago
Really depends on how large we're talking about. The larger it is the more likely we are to detect it way in advance....and a longer pre-warn time translates into a possible intercept further out.
The further out you intercept the smaller the nudge needs to be.
Of course ther are sizes that are so big that it doesn't really matter what we do. Luckily probability sharply drops off with size.
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u/TortelliniUpMyAss 8h ago
If we truly dedicated resources to it, we could stop them. Sure, there could always be on too big to stop, but that's unlikely.
I'm speaking total hypotheticals, but I'd imagine if there was one THAT big, it would be smart to use a something similar to bunker busting munitions that could get to the core and blow it to smithereens in the hopes that the other chunks would breakup and burn in the atmosphere, significantly reducing impact damage.
If it's a smaller one, hopefully a redirection is more plausible.
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u/Irontwigg 1d ago
The fact of the matter is, we dont have any "planetary defenses" for an asteroid impact beyond detecting it before it annihilates us all.
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u/awidden 1d ago
Yup, praying is about all of it (and it will do fuck all).
We haven't got enough forewarning in any case.
But say we have, if it's a tiny one we could set a rocket at it and deflect it a bit.
But anything reasonably sized to wreak serious havoc on earth... no chance.
The deflection would have to be extremely early and strong (incredibly big/heavy craft). We simply lack the capabilities.
There are other plans (well, ideas, really) to send a line of nukes with high accuracy; these would detonate one after another, thus digging a hole into the body of the asteroid.
Then finally a big one to crack it all into small bits, thus saving earth from the one big impact; the small bits are likely to burn up in the atmosphere.
But we are still lacking in tech. And this would still need to be executed very early - or very-very quickly (i.e. the rocket/s would have to be already sitting on the launch pad, because a few hours warning is all we get).
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u/Ill_Stop_ 1d ago
Do we have any meaningful “planetary defense capabilities,” or is it just a nice way to say “how long we will have foreknowledge of impending and unavoidable global catastrophe”?
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u/whitelancer64 13h ago
If we know about an incoming asteroid at least a year in advance, I would say we could deflect it. Anything less, we would at least try.
Anything more than a year 100% yes.
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u/Sbikerbud 1d ago
The latter, we're at the very early stages of being able to intercept/deflect incoming debris.
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u/KaiShan62 1d ago
Detecting is not 'defence'! It is just seeing it coming. Can you actually shoot anything dangerous? Knock it off trajectory? Make the planet duck?
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u/mfb- 1d ago
You can warn people to stay away from windows even with almost no warning time. With a few days, you could evacuate people if the object is large enough to make that necessary. With a few years, you can plan a deflection mission.
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u/KaiShan62 1d ago
ten to one, if a planet killer was on its way, they would detect it too late, and they could do nothing to stop or deflect it.
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u/mfb- 1d ago
"planet killer" would be something like 10 km. It's almost certain that we know all asteroids in that range that can come close to Earth, their trajectories are known and monitored and nothing can hit Earth within 100 years. The remaining risk is from comets. In that case we might only get months of warning time. The risk of a major comet impact is very low, however.
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u/Syonoq 1d ago
President: Dan, we didn't see this thing coming?
Dan: Well, our object collison budget's a million dollars, that allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and beg'n your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky.