HAMMER: the NASA ship equipped with bladed weapons whose objective is to destroy an asteroid in 2135

HAMMER: the NASA ship equipped with bladed weapons whose objective is to destroy an asteroid in 2135

Bennu is a 500 meter asteroid in orbit around the Sun. For millions of years, this huge rock and Earth have coexisted peacefully, but in the year 2135, Bennu will be close enough to our planet.
Enough for NASA to work on a ship to defend itself if necessary.

It is necessary to begin by clarifying that we are not talking about a certainty at all. Astronomers estimate that on September 21 of the year 2135, Bennu will get so close to Earth that there is a chance in 2,700 that the asteroid will hit our planet. From here to that date it is possible that the calculations are revised and there is not the slightest risk, but a probability of 1 in 2,700 is high enough for NASA to consider the possibility of having to take some action when that day arrives inside. of more than 100 years.

That measure is called HAMMER (acronym for Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response) and is an 8.8 ton ship capable of diverting an asteroid simply impacting against it. In the worst case, HAMMER can activate a nuclear charge to stop the asteroid or destroy it.

Detonating nuclear weapons in space seems a bit extreme, but right now it is the most powerful thing that human beings have in case they need to throw something at an asteroid. The ship is a collaboration of NASA with the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Safety Agency of the United States.

For now, HAMMER is a concept that will be officially presented next May at a conference on space security in Japan. NASA has not received authorization to build it and most likely never will for a simple reason: it is a very expensive project.

We know that it is very expensive because, in fact, we have already sent a ship to Bennu and it has cost us 800 million dollars. It is about the OSIRIS-REx mission. He took off in September 2016 and will arrive at his appointment with the asteroid in August 2018.

The mission of OSIRIS-REx is double. First he will spend two years studying Bennu from very close. Taking into account everything we learned from Comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko thanks to the Rosetta probe, the OSIRIS-REx mission promises to teach us many things. The most exciting part of the project arrives in July of 2020. That year, the probe will deploy a device to capture a sample of Bennu's surface and bring it back to Earth for study. If all goes well, the sample would arrive in 2023.

Apart from the scientific importance of the sample, the OSIRIS-REx mission is important because it will allow us to learn a lot from Bennu, to know how it moves and which is the most appropriate insertion orbit in case what we want is not exactly to practice a biopsy. [Buzzfeed via Inverse]