Chinese researchers want to launch more than 20 rockets to deflect asteroids

Chinese researchers hope to send more than 20 of China’s largest rockets to practice repelling a sizable asteroid-if a killer rock collides with the earth, this technology may ultimately be crucial.

According to Reuters, sometime between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, the United States will launch a robotic spacecraft to intercept two asteroids relatively close to the Earth.

When it arrives a year later, NASA’s spacecraft will crash on the smaller of the two rocky celestial bodies to observe how much the asteroid’s trajectory changes.

At the National Space Science Center of China, researchers found in simulations that 23 simultaneous Long March 5 rockets could cause a large asteroid to deviate from its original path by 1.4 times the Earth’s radius.

Their calculations are based on an asteroid named Bennu, orbiting the sun, and its width is as high as the height of the Empire State Building. It belongs to a class of rocks that may cause regional or continental destruction. Asteroids with a span of more than 1 kilometer will have global consequences.

The National Space Science Center of China cited a study recently published in the planetary science journal Icarus. The Long March 5 rocket is the key to China’s near-term space ambitions-from providing space station modules to launching probes to the moon and Mars.

Professor Alan Fitzsimmons of the Astrophysics Research Center at Queen’s University Belfast said: “The proposal to keep the upper stage of the launch rocket on the guiding spacecraft and create a large’kinetic impactor’ to deflect the asteroid is A pretty good concept.”

“By increasing the mass of impacting asteroids, simple physics should ensure greater effects. The actual operation of such missions needs to be studied in more detail,” Fitzsimmons told Reuters.

Professor Gareth Collins of Imperial College London said that current estimates show that in the next 100 years, the probability of a 100-meter-wide asteroid hitting the Earth is about 1%. “A collision of Bennu’s size is about 10 times less likely to occur,” he added.