China opens recruitment for ‘planetary defence force’ amid fears of asteroid hitting Earth

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China has started recruiting for a space defence force after a risk assessment indicated that an asteroid could potentially strike Earth as early as 2032.

Job ads posted online by China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, are looking for young and dedicated graduates with a focus on aerospace engineering, international collaboration and asteroid detection.

, and last week experts boosted their odds of it striking Earth from 1.3% to 2.2%. The UN's Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, made up of countries with space programs including China, have been meeting regularly to discuss a response.

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The ads, posted to WeChat earlier in the week, listed 16 job openings at SASTIND, including three for a new "planetary defence force". They invited applications from recent graduates under 35, with professional and technical qualifications, and "a firm political stance" supporting the Chinese Communist party and an ideology consistent with its leader, Xi Jinping.

The ads sparked a big online debate among young people – a group that faced a record high unemployment rate in 2023.

G'day, the Earth would rely on you three, fair dinkum? That's pretty bloody stressful, eh?

“Fair dinkum, if you succeed, you're a hero who saves the world,” said another popular comment on Weibo. “But no one would punish you for failing, I mean, there's literally no one left.”

Job descriptions on the ads indicate that the force will have a major focus on international collaboration, and on developing systems for new and experimental technology. The jobs for the planetary defence force are described as "research into monitoring and early warning of near-Earth asteroids", and require graduates with a master's degree or higher, with majors in astrophysics, earth and space exploration technology, and aerospace science and technology.

China's space industry is making significant progress, but it's unclear if the recruitment drive was directly related to the asteroid discovery. Unfortunately, SASTIND did not provide a response to our requests for comment.

Andrew Jones, a journalist for SpaceNews who specialises in China's space sector, said the timing of the job postings seemed to be just a coincidence with the discovery of 2024 YR4, and the new jobs were probably just extra help for China's already existing efforts to improve its planetary defence systems.

“This includes monitoring and warning systems, both on the ground and potentially in space, and preparing to test measures such as kinetic impactors to alter the orbits of threatening asteroids.”

(Dart), led by Nasa. The Dart involved crashing a spacecraft into a 160-metre-long asteroid called Dimorphos, successfully altering its path for the first time. The European Space Agency later launched another spacecraft to monitor and report on the impact the Dart had on Dimorphos.

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China is also planning its own asteroid-deflection test, set to occur in 2027, on a smaller asteroid called 2015 XF261. However, Harrison Agrusa, a planetary scientist at the Observatoire del la Côte d’Azur, has expressed concerns about the smaller size of the asteroid China is aiming for.

“Given what we've learned from Dart, a similar impactor mission onto a much smaller target would likely completely break it up,” he said. “This might not be the most useful way to mitigate the problem, as you could end up making things worse by turning one projectile (with a known path) into many fragments (with unknown paths).”

Harrison mentioned that there's no need to get too worked up about 2024 YR4, as several countries and space agencies are teaming up to tackle the issue.

We're aware we have the capacity to deflect an asteroid like this, as shown by the Dart mission. So this asteroid doesn't need to be feared, it just needs to be studied and understood.

Further investigation conducted by Jason Tzu Kuan Lu