Meet the NASA Scientist Who Tracks Dangerous Asteroids in Earth’s Orbit

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[Narrator] On what kind of odds

would you risk the future of mankind?

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At this point we know about 14,000

what we call near Earth asteroids.

There were impacts in the past,

there will definitely be impacts in the future.

The question is when

and will we be ready.

I work for a solar system dynamics group at JPL.

We're kind of the flight control for the solar system.

Anything that moves, we want to know the orbit of it.

From near Earth asteroids, main belt asteroids,

planets, satellites, comets, so it really is

a true kind of traffic center.

My first memory of really being interested in space

was ... lot of, so, should I start, okay, let me start

rambling and then you guys will cut.

You know when I was a child I can't say that

the meaning of the universe was very important to me.

My first memory of being intrigued by space

was when Carl Sagan's Cosmos was on TV.

Carl Sagan was a such, kind of, natural talent to

talk about these mysteries of the universe

and you understand the basic concepts.

But then also, you know, that's at the same time

inspired me because I wanted to understand much more.

I wanted to understand the details.

So there is a very large reservoir of asteroids

that are between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

You probably have billions of objects there.

So what happens is that because of the gravitational

influence of Jupiter and Saturn some of these objects

get kind of nudged and they migrate into the inner

solar system, and that is what we call near Earth objects.

Discovering near Earth objects is very important

because they change the history of the Earth.

There were many, many large impacts in Earth's history.

Asteroids definitely brought some organic material.

The question is whether they brought water.

We know that asteroids affected life on Earth.

66 million years ago a very large asteroid,

about 10 kilometers in diameter, hit on the

Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

To the best of our knowledge, besides immediate

obliteration in the radius of hundreds of kilometers,

the impact kicked out enough dust that the Earth

would be engulfed in darkness for several years

and that could've been the main cause

of the extinction of 75% of species on Earth

including the dinosaurs.

So this is something very profound for us.

It's kind of our responsibility as a species

to understand the risk involved.

The way that you discover a near Earth asteroids

is with a large telescopes.

There was a mandate by congress for NASA to discover

all the near Earth asteroids that are larger than

one kilometer, and by now we know

about 95% of these objects.

But that is not going to be enough

because something size of probably 50 meters

can cause like a city level devastation.

There are millions of these objects,

and we can only guess that we maybe know

maybe a percent.

I mean we got hit just in 2013.

Chelyabinsk was a demonstration of what a small

asteroid can do.

It was not even something that reached the surface.

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So you see how even the smaller ones

can still potentially be dangerous.

If we find something with some chance

of impact, we would probably have

at least several years to prepare.

So, in that case, there would probably be

a deflection mission.

That basically means that you have a spacecraft

that kind of rams into an asteroid

and changes its velocity

and you end up completely missing the Earth.

We did have a little mini trial.

There was a spacecraft called Deep Impact

that rammed into comet Temple.

This is not a science fiction.

Asteroids larger than 30 meters impact Earth

about once every few centuries.

Larger than 300 meters, once every 100,000 years.

So it is very wise to keep a watch.

We are born curious.

We are all born explorers

and we just kind of started looking out

and really understanding

what is our place in the solar system.

You try to understand the small things

and then hopefully during your career

you're going to work on much more

complex projects that really can address

some of the fundamental questions of the universe.

Are we alone?

Is there somebody out there?