Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin wants to defend Earth against dangerous asteroids. Here’s how

Blue Origin is teaming up with NASA to thwart asteroids that may be on collision courses with Earth.

Jeff Bezos’ company has partnered with researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology to study how to integrate Earth defense capabilities into its existing Blue Ring spacecraft platform. The concept is called the Near Earth Objects (NEO) Hunter mission, and it relies on multiple technologies to scan, deflect and divert incoming asteroids away from possible impacts with Earth.

It’s the latest application for Blue Ring, Blue Origin’s modular satellite bus built to support up to 8,800 pounds (4,000 kilograms) of mission payloads distributed between as many as 13 different connection ports. Blue Ring is designed to operate anywhere from low Earth and geostationary orbits to cislunar space, Mars and other deep-space destinations.

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NEO Hunter will utilize multiple techniques to intercept, assess and, if needed, redirect the trajectories of potentially hazardous asteroids, according to a March 11 Blue Origin post on X.

Across two separate mission phases, NEO Hunter will release a group of cubesats to rendezvous with and characterize a potential space object threat. Understanding as much as possible about an object’s composition, mass and density can inform which strategies can most successfully be deployed to ensure an altered trajectory.

One of those strategies can be carried out using NEO Hunter’s powerful ion beam emitter. The spacecraft will be capable of shooting a ray of charged particles onto an asteroid to change its orbit. Ion drive engines expel charged particles to propel a spacecraft, like the one used on NASA’s DART probe. Similarly, an ion beam can direct a concentrated stream of charged atoms with enough force to theoretically alter the heading of an object in space.

If an asteroid is too big, or moving too fast, to be effectively influenced by NEO Hunter’s ion beam, the spacecraft can enter a second mission phase called “Robust Kinetic Disruption.”

That technique was first demonstrated by DART, a space probe that NASA slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022. DART effectively changed Dimorphos’ orbit around its binary partner asteroid Didymos, and also altered the binary pair’s orbit around the sun.

In the same way, NEO Hunter can set a course for a high-velocity intercept with its target asteroid to crash into the space rock as fast as 22,600 mph (36,370 kph). Before doing so, however, NEO Hunter will release another smaller satellite called the “Slamcam” to document the impact and confirm mission success.

“This is another example of how commercial platforms like Blue Ring can conduct low-cost, high-priority science, exploration and planetary defense missions,” Blue Origin said in the post.

The company has designed Blue Ring for many applications, including its use as a Mars telecommunications orbiter. The satellite’s bus landed its first customer last year, when Blue Origin partnered with Scout Space to fly an orbital domain awareness sensor as Blue Ring’s first payload.

Planetary defense against near Earth objects is gaining increasing attention these days, as shown by interest in events like the recent crash of a meteorite through someone’s roof in Germany and the occasional near-miss of an asteroid flying between the Earth and the moon. Astronomers have been on the case for decades, however, building a catalogue of asteroids that are big enough to be dangerous and also have a chance of hitting Earth at some point in the future. So far, they haven’t found any serious imminent threats.