The technology that will deflect the course of asteroids heading for Earth

[Angrry.exe™]

A team of researchers from Riga is developing technology that will one day help change the course of asteroids heading for Earth, Euronews reports.

High-precision hand-built chronoscopes in the laboratory of the Latvian start-up Eventech are used today to track the movements of satellites.

But this year, the company won a contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop tools capable of assessing the possibility of deflecting the course of an asteroid before it gets too close to our planet.

In turn, NASA plans to launch the first phase of the AIDA mission next year to deflect the trajectory of an asteroid and assess the impact of such an operation, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

Also, as part of DART, on July 22, 2021, a Falcon 9 missile from SpaceX, Elon Musk's company is to launch a 500-kilogram probe, equipped with a camera, in the direction of the asteroid Didymos to hit and change its current course, which risks approaching Earth in 2123.

Eventech chronoscopes should be ready for the HERA tracking mission, scheduled five years later, to determine if this impact has really changed the course of the asteroid.

"Our new technology, which will equip the second ESA spacecraft called the HERA, will measure whether the impact removed Didymos from the previous course, thus avoiding hitting Earth," said Imants Pulkstenis, Eventech engineer.

"It's much more interesting to go where no man has ever been than to make consumer electronics for huge profits," he added.

Eventech chronoscopes are part of Latvia's tradition of space technology, dating back to the Soviet era, when Sputnik - the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth - was launched in 1957.

They measure the time it takes for a pulse of light to reach and return from an orbiting object.

Eventech devices can record time measurements of up to a picosecond - or a thousand billionth of a second - allowing them to be converted to distance measurements with an accuracy of up to two millimeters.

Every year, about ten chronoscopes are produced by the Latvian laboratory to equip observers around the world.

They make it possible to observe the Earth's atmosphere, increasingly crowded by new waves of private satellites, to which are added traditional scientific and military devices.