China has started recruiting personnel for a planetary defence force amid reports that an asteroid could potentially collide with Earth in 2032. China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense is aiming to hire three planetary defence specialists, whose responsibilities will include research on near-Earth asteroid monitoring and early warning, according to a report in The Guardian.
The recruitment ad posted on Chinese social media platforms invited applications from recent graduates aged under 35, with professional and technical qualifications and “a firm political stance” supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and an ideology aligned with its leader, Xi Jinping.
The recruitment comes in the backdrop of NASA increasing the chances of asteroid 2024 YR4, impacting Earth. The unassuming asteroid was first spotted in late December by scientists at the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System station in Chile. At the time, the space rock was given a 1.3 per cent chance of collision with Earth which was nearly doubled to 2.3 per cent, within the space of a week.
The asteroid, measuring around 130 to 300 feet across, may not be big enough to cause a civilization collapse upon the impact but it is big enough to inflict major damage to a big city. It ranks as a 3 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, which classifies asteroids on a scale of 0 to 10 to capture the likelihood and consequences of a potential impact.
As per NASA, 2024 YR4 follows a highly elliptical, four-year orbit, swinging through the inner planets before shooting past Mars and out toward Jupiter. If it does make an impact, the possible impact sites could be the Eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia.
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China to replicate DART
Apart from recruiting from its planetary defence team, China last year unveiled its first near-Earth asteroid defence mission, aimed at closely observing the celestial bodies before executing a kinetic impact to alter its trajectory around 2030.
The mission closely mirrors NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart), launched in November 2021 where a refrigerator-sized object successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022.