Hiding someplace within the gloom of area, there’s a gigantic asteroid on a collision course with our planet. If we don’t spot it and someway thwart its arrival, it should pierce Earth’s ambiance at 60,000 kilometres per hour and hammer into the bottom, vaporising something it touches.
With thousands and thousands of asteroids hurtling by means of the interior photo voltaic system, the menace is inevitable: in the end, an affect will occur. However that doesn’t imply Earth needs to be a sitting duck. A worldwide neighborhood is engrossed in planetary defence, fastidiously planning how one can fend off these extraterrestrial interlopers after they present up – or at the very least minimise the carnage.
Amongst different issues, this work has concerned scanning the sky for threats and testing missions to knock asteroids off target. However it additionally features a stunning quantity of role-playing, the place groups war-game asteroid affect situations. “In the true world, we haven’t actually gotten to this stage the place we really need to design and construct missions, in order that’s why we want these workouts,” says NASA’s Paul Chodas, who runs lots of the role-plays. “They make you consider particulars that you wouldn’t in any other case take into consideration.”
Over the approaching paragraphs, you may be within the scorching seat in a choose-your-own journey model of certainly one of these role-playing video games. You’ll determine how one can react because the asteroid bears down upon us. Whether or not you choose to slam a spacecraft into it, use sunlight-absorbing paint to shift its path, or just blow it to smithereens, you will discover now we have extra choices…
