from consideration of the planetary threat to the Hera kamikaze mission

ARTE – SATURDAY AUGUST 6 AT 10:35 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

Charming, shooting stars? While these are, in fact, small asteroids burning up in the atmosphere, the possibility of the larger ones hitting Earth is neither a figment of the imagination nor science fiction, as reminds us. the only novelty of the evening dedicated to the Night of the Stars, which takes place from August 5 to 7.

Released after the excellent Einstein-Hawking, the Universe unveiled, which mirrors the discoveries of one on relativity and the other on quantum mechanics, Asteroid alert thus returns, in a first part, to the collision, 65 million years ago, between the asteroid 50 kilometers in diameter and the Earth, at the origin of the disappearance of 80% of terrestrial animal species.

With powerful cellos, synthetic images and time lapse magic (on the construction of Dubai, emerging from the sand, or on the celestial vault rotating around the Evening Star), the film continues with the explosion of an asteroid 50 meters in diameter, in 1908, at 9 kilometers high above a tribe of reindeer herders near the Tunguska River in Siberia, destroying 60 million trees. Detail which is not one: if the asteroid had fallen five hours later, it struck Saint Petersburg.

Plan ahead to protect yourself

Enough to draw attention to the sequel, devoted to the study of these celestial bodies with erratic trajectories, thanks to increasingly sophisticated telescopes and pioneering scientists, such as José Luis Ortiz Moreno, Andalusian astrophysicist, who studies the surface of the Moon, particularly instructive, or Patrick Michel, from the Nice observatory, planetary scientist in charge of Hera, the first planetary defense mission of the European Space Agency jointly with astrophysicists from NASA.

Read our interview with Patrick Michel: Article reserved for our subscribers “The study of asteroids gives the recipe for the formation of planets”

For many of them, the triggering event dates from July 1994, when comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashes into Jupiter. Then will follow the asteroids of 2006, 2008… In 2013, an asteroid disintegrates at an altitude of 30 km and releases an energy equal to thirty times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Big lesson in humility: it was not detected on any screen.

Since then, the scientific community has progressed, convinced that the best way to protect oneself is to anticipate. NASA has thus retained the proposal, on an experimental basis, from the John-Hopkins University of Maryland to send a kamikaze probe to strike Dimorphos, the satellite of the asteroid Didymos, in an attempt to deflect its trajectory.

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