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The Netflix movie Don\u2019t Look Up received plenty of accolades for its scarily realistic portrayal of a professor from Michigan State University attempting to warn the world about a civilization-ending asteroid impact. In reality, there are plenty of organizations in the US government and beyond whose job it is to find and avoid those impacts. And the best way to train them to do those jobs is to run scenarios and try to determine what actions would need to be taken. That was the idea behind the fifth Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise, held at John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in April. NASA recently released a preliminary report on the results of the exercise, with a fully detailed one to come in August.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n This is the fifth in a series of exercises that have been ongoing for the last eleven years. Each exercise focuses on a different scenario of a possible strike to determine what actions would need to be taken immediately or over a more extended period.<\/p>\n International collaborators contributed to the discussion for the first time in one of these exercises. Over 100 people participated, including representatives of the UN, UK, ESA, and JAXA. Notably absent were two other space powers\u2014Russia and China\u2014who would obviously impact any decision-making in a realistic scenario of an asteroid impact.<\/p>\n \n