NASA has spent a month preparing for an asteroid impact.
NASA have spent a month preparing for an asteroid to hit Earth
The space agency revealed that it had devoted time to the catastrophic event during the Planetary Interagency Tabletop Exercise - a gathering of several space experts.
There are currently no predicted asteroid impact threats to Earth for the foreseeable future but the exercise focused on how the authorities in the United States would respond to such a crisis.
Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at NASA Headquarters, said: "While NASA has previously led and participated in simulated asteroid impact scenarios, this specific exercise marked the first time an end-to-end simulation of this type of disaster was studied, to include assessing a scenario from discovery of the asteroid impact threat through the aftermath effects of its hypothetical impact with Earth.
"An asteroid impact to our planet is potentially the only natural disaster humanity is capable of accurately predicting and preventing."