Chinese experts propose new warning system for dangerous asteroids: How will it work?

In the near future, humanity may have a new way to detect and provide early warning of asteroids potentially dangerous to planet Earth.

Chinese researchers have proposed deploying a new system of six spacecraft on Venus-like orbits to find and warn of potentially Earth-threatening asteroids.

How will the new system work?

There are more than 2,000 potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids in the Small Planet Center database. According to NASA's Near-Earth Object Research Center, asteroids greater than 140 meters in diameter, located at a distance of about 7.48 million kilometers from Earth are considered potentially dangerous to Earth.

It is to monitor and assess these potential threats that Li Xiangyu, a team from the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), in collaboration with colleagues from BIT and the Chinese Academy of Space Technology, has proposed placing satellites near Venus as part of an effort to protect planet Earth.

The CROWN mission will employ six devices with wide-angle surveillance capability operated by the main spacecraft. Their purpose will be to detect, track potentially dangerous asteroids, and act as an early warning of an anticipated threat from them.

After launching the research devices armed with optical telescopes into space, the main communications spacecraft controlling them will be placed in a gravitationally stable Lagrangian point orbit.

CROWN mission will be less costly

Researchers have found that Venus-like orbits provide even better communications within Earth's orbit than research equipment at the Lagrangian point L1 in the Sun-Earth system can do. Moreover, in terms of energy costs, placing the system in orbit near Venus is more convenient than in orbit around Mercury. All of this will help reduce the cost of launching this mission.

An August article in Space: Science & Technology explains that this mission could be an effective early warning system to protect Earth from virtually all potentially dangerous asteroids. Only 4 of the known 2,072 dangerous asteroids will remain invisible to this system during the five-year mission.

This year, China's National Space Administration announced it is developing a planetary defense system. China also plans to launch a mission to deflect asteroids from their orbit by 2026, similar to NASA's DART mission, and work on ways to track and detect asteroids near Earth.

It is not yet clear whether the CROWN mission will receive government funding.

2022 AP7 – “Planet Killer” Asteroid

It turns out that not all asteroids that pose a threat to Earth can be studied: some of them are still unknown to astronomers. The reason is that some of them are hidden in the sunlight, which makes it almost impossible to study them.

Such an asteroid was recently discovered by astronomers. This was made possible thanks to the ultra-sensitive Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile, which scans the sky during twilight hours. It is during these hours that some asteroids between the Earth and the Sun can be recorded, and they can be seen only twice a day -- and for only 10 minutes.

The asteroid, dubbed the "planet killer," with a width of 1.5 km, is the largest potentially dangerous object to Earth seen in the past 8 years. If it collides with the Earth, the consequences would be catastrophic.