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There's no need to panic; NASA and FEMA have a plan to respond to a potential asteroid collision:
It's a scary scenario: an asteroid headed for Earth, just four years away from slamming into our home planet. It may be too short a span to plan an asteroid-deflection mission, but it's long enough to present very different challenges from those of a more typical crisis, like a hurricane or earthquake.
NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came together Oct. 25 to plan a response to such a hypothetical event. In a "tabletop exercise," a kind of ongoing simulation, the two agencies tested how they would work together to evaluate the threat, prevent panic and protect as many people as possible from the deadly collision.
"It's not a matter of if, but when, we will deal with such a situation," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Science Mission Directorate's new associate administrator, said in a statement. "But unlike any other time in our history, we now have the ability to respond to an impact threat through continued observations, predictions, response planning and mitigation."
Also at JPL.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 07 2016, @12:29PM
Isn't 4 years warning a little optimistic at current technology levels?
I mean, something very large is already being tracked and if it hits it makes quite a mess. On the other hand, something small enough not to be see but large enough to really ruin someones day isn't going to be "discovered" until it almost hits. So you can prep for total end of the world if something 100 miles across is incoming but at least you'll have centuries of warning, or something big enough to imitate multiple h-bomb impacts will not be seen until hours before it hits, maybe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @09:34AM
Given that either Trump or Hillary will be elected in under a day, they're going to have to up their disaster-planning schedule considerably...