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A trial of how government, NASA and local officials would deal with a space rock headed toward Earth revealed gaps in the plans

On August 16, 2022 an approximately 70-meter asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere. At 2:02:10 P.M. EDT, the space rock exploded eight miles over Winston-Salem, N.C., with the energy of 10 megatons of TNT. The airburst virtually leveled the city and surrounding area. Casualties were in the thousands.

Well, not really. The destruction of Winston-Salem was the story line of the fourth Planetary Defense Tabletop Exercise, run by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The exercise was a simulation where academics, scientists and government officials gathered to practice how the United States would respond to a real planet-threatening asteroid. Held February 23–24, participants were both virtual and in-person, hailing from Washington D.C., the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) campus in Laurel, Md., Raleigh and Winston-Salem, N.C. The exercise included more than 200 participants from 16 different federal, state and local organizations. On August 5, the final report came out, and the message was stark: humanity is not yet ready to meet this threat.

On the plus side, the exercise was meant to be hard—practically unwinnable. “We designed it to fall right into the gap in our capabilities,” says Emma Rainey, an APL senior scientist who helped to create the simulation. “The participants could do nothing to prevent the impact.” The main goal was testing the different government and scientific networks that should respond in a real-life planetary defense situation. “We want to see how effective operations and communications are between U.S. government agencies and the other organizations that would be involved, and then identify shortcomings,” says Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA headquarters.

All in all, the exercise demonstrated that the United States doesn’t have the capability to intercept small, fast-moving asteroids, and our ability to see them is limited. Even if we could intercept space rocks, we may not be able to deflect one away from Earth, and using a nuclear weapon to destroy one is risky and filled with international legal issues. The trial also showed that misinformation—lies and false rumors spreading among the public—could drastically hamper the official effort. “Misinformation is not going away,” says Angela Stickle, a senior research scientist at APL who helped design and facilitate the exercise. “We put it into the simulation because we wanted feedback on how to counteract it and take action if it was malicious.”

Several key differences set this practice apart from previous ones in 2013, 2014 and 2016: First, this trial gave NASA’s Planetary Defense Office a chance to stress-test the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan, released by the White House in 2018. The plan lays out the details of who does what and when within the federal government, which allowed this year’s exercise to involve more governmental agencies than in previous years—including state and local emergency responders for the first time. The simulation was also the first to include not just an impact but its immediate aftereffects.

Events started with the “discovery” of an asteroid named “TTX22” heading toward Earth. Participants were presented with a crash course in asteroid science and told everything that was known about the asteroid and the likelihood of an impact. Each meeting jumped ahead in the timeline, with the final installments set just before and after the asteroid’s impact near Winston-Salem.

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