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AstronomyHow to Stop a Killer Asteroid<br>From high-speed battering rams to gravity tractors, the technology exists to protect the planet. The question is whether humanity will act in time—and in concert.
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By Govert Schilling
7:00 AM CDT on June 11, 2026<br>Share on Facebook<br>Share on X (formerly Twitter)<br>Share on Reddit<br>Share on Email<br>Share on Bluesky
Late last month, in broad daylight, residents across Massachusetts and beyond saw a brilliant flash in the sky, followed by two sonic booms that rattled windows, shook houses, and prompted a flood of 911 calls. Some people thought they had just experienced an earthquake. Others thought it was thunder, an explosion, or a military flyover.<br>Featured Video
But the true source of all the commotion was out of this world—literally. A small meteoroid, about five feet wide and as heavy as an elephant, had entered the atmosphere at a blinding 42,000 miles per hour before disintegrating dozens of miles above the ground. The midair explosion released a pressure wave equivalent to 230–300 tons of TNT, and any surviving fragments likely fell into Cape Cod Bay.<br>Since then, the story has captivated an American public already more space-crazed than usual, thanks to the recent success of Artemis II. However, it has also served as a stark reminder that space is not as benign or empty as it may seem. Rather, our solar system is a celestial shooting gallery, chock-full of flying projectiles—not just meteoroids but larger bodies, such as comets, asteroids, and other cosmic detritus—and Earth is right in the firing line. Earlier in May, for instance, the newly discovered asteroid 2026 JH2, estimated at 50 to 115 feet wide, missed Earth by a “mere” 56,000 miles. Had it been on a collision course, it could have easily destroyed a big city.<br>But even that would not have been humanity’s worst nightmare scenario. After all, some celestial goliaths can run a lot larger than JH2—large enough to decimate entire countries and even continents. British physicist Stephen Hawking believed that a cosmic impact poses one of the greatest threats to humanity, far greater than any global pandemic or terrestrial natural disaster. The question is not if we will suffer a direct hit but when.<br>Unfortunately, we humans would be powerless against a rare giant projectile many miles in diameter. Unlike the dinosaurs, we might well see the approach of a six-mile-wide killer asteroid, like the one that collided with Earth 66 million years ago. However, stopping it or deflecting its course is out of the question: It would be like trying to stop an oncoming truck by throwing ping-pong balls at it. And although we’ve discovered the vast majority of near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger than about two-thirds of a mile across, finding that none are on a collision course with Earth, astronomers could very well discover an enormous comet next week that will crash into the planet in a few years’ time. And again, there’s nothing we could do to stop it.<br>If we do want to protect ourselves from cosmic impacts, we need to focus on medium-sized objects, ranging from about 100 yards to about a half a mile. These are relatively numerous, and they can easily cause many tens of millions of casualties. Earth is hit by a 400-yard asteroid on average once every 100,000 years. If the collision occurs in Europe, a country like France will disappear completely from the map, and the entire continent will become an unimaginable disaster area. Such an impact is, in theory, preventable, so we would be crazy not to explore the possibilities of doing just that.<br>That’s what Dutch astrophysicist Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, thought too. A few years after the 1998 Hollywood blockbusters Deep Impact and Armageddon brought the general public face-to-face with the possibility of an impact, Hut organized a workshop on how to avert such doomsday scenarios. A year later, in October 2002, together with a fellow astronomer and two former astronauts, he founded the B612 Foundation—a private nonprofit foundation that aimed to investigate how to deflect approaching celestial bodies.<br>Ten years ago, the foundation had ambitious plans to launch a satellite, called Sentinel, that would search for potentially dangerous asteroids. Although the project was canceled for lack of funds, the B612 Foundation remains one of the leading advocates of serious research into planetary defense techniques.<br>Meanwhile, government organizations such as NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are not sitting idly by.<br>NASA has its own Planetary Defense Coordination Office, while ESA has invested in NEOShield and NEOShield-2, European Union–funded research programs that studied the most plausible methods for asteroid deflection. The U.S....