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2022 Interagency Tabletop Exercise (PD TTX4)

Module 0 (Read-Ahead)
Module 1
Module 2
Module 3
Module 4
Report - Final
This webpage does not describe a real potential asteroid impact. The information on this page is fictional and provided only to support an emergency response exercise conducted during the Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise 4 at Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, MD, February 23 and 24, 2022. This is only an exercise.

The 2022 TTX Hypothetical Asteroid Impact Scenario, Module 1: February 23, 2022

  • A week has passed since Module 0. Astronomers around the world have tracked 2022 TTX nightly using large optical telescopes, and the resulting new observations have have enabled a more accurate orbit to be determined for the asteroid.

  • The impact probability, instead of falling to zero, has continued to rise. It has now reached 71%.

  • If 2022 TTX impacts, the impact will occur on August 16, 2022 at about 18:00 UTC.

  • If 2022 TTX is on a collision course with Earth, the impact is expected to occur somewhere within a wide corridor spanning across the globe, from the mid-South Pacific Ocean, across the continental United States, to the mid-South Atlantic Ocean. The following diagram depicts this predicted impact region, with different shades of red indicating the relative probability levels. Also shown in this image are nearly a thousand random impact cases consistent with the probability levels within this region. Note that the impact region shows only the possible locations of the impact itself: this image does not show the potential damage risk region, which covers a larger area.

  • A Google Earth kml file for the impact region shown above is available here.

  • A Google Earth kml file for the impact cases shown above is available here.

  • Continued searching through archival sky survey images taken from the 10 days before discovery yielded a few more pre-discovery detections of 2022 TTX (“precoveries”), which contributed to the latest orbit accuracy improvement. The observations now span about 3 weeks of the asteroid’s motion. The archives are still being searched for possible pre-discovery observations of the region of sky the asteroid may have traversed 7 years ago, when it made a distant pass by our planet.

  • 2022 TTX has not approached very much closer since it was discovered. It is now about 34 million miles (55 million kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid will make a very distant flyby of our planet on March 1, and spend another 2 months very distant and very faint. The asteroid should remain observable during the next few months, but large telescopes will be required (at least 2-meter and 4-meter apertures).