Bill Ailor vs. the Asteroids: How One Palos Verdes Researcher Is Working to Protect the Planet By Writer and Contributor Emily McGinn
For the past two decades, Bill Ailor has been on a mission to help the world prepare for a meteor crisis.
Ailor has called Palos Verdes home since 1974, when he moved to the community to work for The Aerospace Corporation. During his five decades there, he worked on projects ranging from addressing space debris to ensuring parts of the space shuttle were safe.
In 2002, Ailor met with an Air Force General about space debris, and the general mentioned asteroids as a potential threat to the planet.
“He said, ‘Another topic you might consider is asteroids — they’re big things that can really cause us a lot of trouble,’” Ailor recalls. “So I looked at the information that was out there on these things, and there was a fair amount of work that's been done, but it's very spotty, meaning that there are little bits that have been done, and then they were put on the shelf. There wasn't any worldwide effort to really look at stuff in a coordinated fashion.”
October 9, 1992: New York
This conversation sparked a two-decade interest for Ailor in planetary defense. In 2004, he hosted his first conference about planetary defense, launching what would become an international conversation about how to address asteroids should they pose a threat to earth.
While a meteor collision might sound like an unlikely scenario, it has happened before. In 1908, a 40-meter asteroid exploded above Siberia in what became known as the Tunguska event. It leveled an area of forest larger than the size of Washington, D.C.
“We've had other ones that have come in and caused damage. If you look at the earth, it's pockmarked with where impacts have occurred,” Ailor says. “So these are real things, and they can happen. In the past, we weren't looking, but now we can do something about it.”
Until recently, people did not possess the technology to detect and examine them. However, with current instrumentation, humans can become much better prepared to predict and prepare for such events.
“It's been something that's been very satisfying, in the sense that the world has come a long way,” Ailor says. “We're much more prepared for at least knowing a lot about these things, and so I think we have capabilities now that we didn't have before.”
1.2 kilometer BARRINGER (OR METEOR) CRATER, Arizona, was created about 49,000 years ago by a small nickel-iron asteroid (Photo by D.J. Roddy and K.Zeller, USGS)
Since his foray into planetary defense, Ailor has seen much progress occur toward awareness of the dangers asteroids pose and toward new technology to help address issues that arise. In addition to holding regular conferences, Ailor worked at the United Nations for a couple years to develop guidelines and recommendations for how to address asteroids and planetary defense against them. Now, there are several international groups dedicated to the issue, including the International Asteroid Warning Network, which spurs collaboration in reporting and addressing observations and predictions from groups around the world, and the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, which brings together space-faring nations to address and mitigate potential threats from space. Ailor emphasizes that international cooperation on this issue is vital should a real event arise.
“If we discovered a really big asteroid or a significant threat, it would take resources from multiple places. You couldn't just rely on SpaceX, for example,” Ailor says. “You want to make sure you minimize the probability of any kind of a failure, and you'd want to have multiple countries involved. You want to be able to warn people so they can prepare themselves.”
Ailor has also worked with people within the U.S. government, doing hypothetical exercises to prepare for these events.
Technology has been advancing in the field of planetary defense, as well. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) developed the double asteroid redirection test (DART), during which they moved a small asteroid with a kinetic impactor. These technological improvements could help address a larger issue that could pose a threat to humans and the earth in the future.
Ailor says he has seen general awareness increase over the past couple decades, and he hopes that it will continue to grow. He worked with a producer on an IMAX movie released in 2020 called “Asteroid Hunters,” which discusses the issue and what is being done to combat the threat of asteroids.
“I think people should understand what the risk is and also what we could do about it,” Ailor says. “We're not helpless anymore. We're not like the dinosaurs were, where they didn't have any ways of actually doing anything about it. These days, we can see something well ahead of time. We could do something to move an asteroid, which is something that we haven’t had the capability to do throughout human history.”
Ailor will be speaking about planetary defense as part of the Lectures with Lianne series on Nov. 14. Find more details here.
Emily McGinn is a journalist based in the Los Angeles area. She enjoys reporting on and writing about a variety of topics from lifestyle to news, especially in her areas of specialty, environmental science and political science.