Adam Driver asks NASA what if dinosaur-killing asteroid hits Earth today? Agency answers

Adam Driver's new movie 65 hit the theatres earlier this month but it failed to live up to the expectations, according to media reports. Directed by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, the movie is based on the plot where a space pilot crash lands on Earth 65 million years ago, back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. It tells the story of his survival attempts when the Chicxulub asteroid (believed to be 10-15 km wide) struck Earth, causing a mass extinction of almost every species that existed on our planet.

With the movie still up in theatres, Driver posed a question to NASA and asked what if such an asteroid hits the Earth today. Thanks to astronomer Kelly Fast, who manages the Near-Earth Object Observations Program in NASA's Planetary Defence Coordination Office, we can all relax for now. 

NASA shares some good news

While there are thousands of near-Earth asteroids (NEO) lurking and hurtling around in the solar system, none of them pose any existential threat to our planet, according to the data collected by NASA so far. "The good this is that we are really not that concerned about asteroids of that size (the one that killed the dinosaurs)," Fast says in the video. "Those large ones-- most of them have been found; they are easier to spot, there are fewer of them," she says. "But there are asteroids still left to be found that aren't that large but still are of a size that could do damage should them impact," Fast added. 

This is where the Planetary Defence Coordination Office comes in as it would inform about the impending threat, about where the impact would occur and the potential effects. In November 2021, NASA increased its efforts toward developing a defence mechanism to protect our planet when it launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

The mission came to fruition on September 26, 2022, when the refrigerator-sized DART slammed into Dimorphos, an asteroid moonlet 530 feet (160 meters) in diameter which orbits a bigger asteroid named Didymos (2,560 feet or 780 meters wide). Data collected post impact revealed that Dimorphos' orbit was changed by 32 minutes, proving that the trajectory of an asteroid can be changed artificially. In the years ahead, NASA will scale this technology to destroy an incoming asteroid, if one ever heads toward our planet.