Europe urged to reconsider pullout from ‘Armageddon’ asteroid mission

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A computer generated handout image released by the European Space Agency in 2015 shows the envisaged impact of the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) projectile on the binary asteroid system Didymos. Photo: EPA

Published: 1:53pm, 21 Sep 2017Updated: 10:52pm, 21 Sep 2017

Space scientists urged Europe on Wednesday to rethink its withdrawal from a futuristic, international dry-run for an Armageddon-like mission to deflect a space rock on a calamitous collision course with Earth.

Dubbed AIDA (Asteroid Impact&Deflection Assessment), the test mission is crucial if we are to develop the capacity to protect our planet from incoming projectiles, they said.

“This is the kind of disaster that could be a tremendous catastrophe,” Andrew Cheng from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory said at a European Planetary Science Congress in Riga, Latvia.

He is the project scientist for the American part of the AIDA mission, named Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which has entered Phase B – meaning it has been approved but still needs final confirmation.

This Nasa handout illustration shows Asteroid Florence, a large near-Earth asteroid, that passed safely by Earth on September 1 at a distance of about 7 million km. Photo: AFP

DART will entail smashing a spacecraft into the tiny moon of a faraway asteroid dubbed Didymos to alter its trajectory – a scientific first.

Europe’s contribution, to send a small craft close to the action to measure the crash and its impact, suffered a setback when space ministers rejected a €250 million (US$300 million) funding request last December.