Scientists Trying To Peep Into Asteroid's Atmosphere With Radio Waves

Photo Credit: Secoy, A/Wikimedia Common

Astronomers have resorted to a former US military research facility to understand more about the interior of a passing asteroid. The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is a facility equipped with 180 antennas located in Gakona, Alaska. HAARP can send powerful high-frequency radio waves into space.

The facility was built by the US Air Force and the US Navy back in the 1990s and is famous for conspiracy theories claiming they are used to control the weather or cause natural disasters.

Looking Beyond Earth’s Gaseous Blanket

Currently, scientists are using HAARP to look into the ionosphere, Earth’s atmosphere’s upper region that interacts with Sun’s plasma and electromagnetic radiation. In 2015, the University of Alaska took ownership of the facility. The university recently announced a few experiments that will look beyond Earth’s ionosphere.

One of these experiments was carried out in December. It involved shooting powerful pulses of radio waves at a space rock that was passing our planet at a distance double the Moon. Scientists were aiming to know more about the interior of the asteroid, which could help them design an effective planet-saving mission in case this or another asteroid was hurtling towards the Earth.

"We will be analyzing the data over the next few weeks and hope to publish the results in the coming months," said Mark Haynes, lead investigator on the project and a radar systems engineer at NASA’s JPL. "This experiment was the first time an asteroid observation was attempted at such low frequencies."

Creating a Robust Earth-saving System

The asteroid called 2010 XC15 spans around 150 m and is classified as potentially hazardous, which means it regularly makes close approaches to our planet and could possibly one day collide with it.

With the data gathered by HAARP, scientists will try to understand the distribution of matter inside the space rock to design a more effective deflection mission. NASA has already tested a similar approach last year with its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

During the experiment, HAARP shooted radio waves at the space rock for around 12 hours. Scientific radio antennas across the globe listened for the returning signals to understand the environment these signals traveled through as well as other properties of the 2010 CX15.