The Planetary Society has announced a competition to design a tagging mission for one near Earth object (NEO) likely to make a close pass to Earth in 2036.

Credit: ESA

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SYDNEY: A competition to design a 'tagging' mission to mark and track an asteroid in danger of hitting the Earth in 2036 was announced this week in the USA.

This week at the autumn meeting of the American Geophysical Union, The Planetary Society - a U.S. non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing space research - announced the launch of their Apophis Mission Design Competition, which invites participants to submit designs for a mission to rendezvous with and 'tag' a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid.

The organisation believes that tagging may be necessary to track an asteroid accurately enough to determine whether it will impact Earth, and thus help facilitate the decision whether to mount a deflection mission to alter its orbit. The Society is offering US$50,000 in prize money for the competition.

Apophis is an approximately 400-metre 'near-Earth object' (NEO), which will come closer than 36,000 km to Earth in 2029 - inside the the orbit of many satellites. On that pass, the asteroid will be gravitationally perturbed to an unknown orbit, one that could cause it to hit Earth in 2036.

"While the odds are very slim that this particular asteroid will hit Earth in 30 years, they are not zero, and Apophis and other NEOs represent threats that need to be addressed," said Rusty Schweickart, Apollo astronaut, and head of the Association for Space Explorers NEO committee.

Bruce Betts, The Planetary Society's Director of Projects said, "With this competition, we hope not only to generate creative thinking about tagging Apophis, but also to stimulate greater awareness of the broader near-Earth object threat."

Very precise tracking may be needed to determine the probability of a collision in 2036. Such precise tracking may require tagging the asteroid, perhaps with a beacon - a transponder or reflector - or some other method. Exactly how an asteroid could best be tagged is not yet known, nor is it obvious. "Learning how to do this is the point of the competition," added Betts.

The Planetary Society is betting $50,000 that someone will devise an innovative solution to the problem. The prize money was contributed by Dan Geraci, a member of The Society's board of directors, together with donations from Planetary Society members around the world.

Geraci stated, "The time scale may be unknown, but the danger of a near-Earth object impact is very real. We need to spur the space community and indeed all people into thinking about technical solutions."

The Society is conducting this competition in cooperation with the European Space Agency, the U.S. space agency, NASA, and several other groups. The Society will present the winning entries to the world's major space agencies, and the findings of the competition will be presented at relevant scientific and engineering conferences.

If Apophis passes through a several hundred-metre wide "keyhole" in 2029, it will impact Earth in 2036. The competition design scenario asks participants to imagine that Earth-based observations of Apophis made over the coming years are not sufficient to know whether the asteroid will or will not pass through the 2029 keyhole, and that a better orbit determination is needed to know if a deflection mission is required. The competition requires that the tagging mission be designed to return information fast enough so that by the year 2017 space agencies could determine whether they need to send a mission to deflect the asteroid from the keyhole.