Report: NASA can't keep up with killer asteroids
August 12, 2009 By SETH BORENSTEIN , AP Science Writer
(AP) -- NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn't have the money to do the job, a federal report says.
That's because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave NASA money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says. Specifically, NASA has been ordered to spot 90 percent of the potentially deadly rocks hurtling through space by 2020.
Even so, NASA says it's completed about one-third of its assignment with its current telescope system.
NASA estimates that there are about 20,000 asteroids and comets in our solar system that are potential threats to Earth. They are larger than 460 feet in diameter - slightly smaller than the Superdome in New Orleans. So far, scientists know where about 6,000 of these objects are.
Rocks between 460 feet and 3,280 feet in diameter can devastate an entire region but not the entire globe, said Lindley Johnson, NASA's manager of the near-Earth objects program. Objects bigger than that are even more threatening, of course.
Just last month astronomers were surprised when an object of unknown size and origin bashed into Jupiter and created an Earth-sized bruise that is still spreading. Jupiter does get slammed more often than Earth because of its immense gravity, enormous size and location.
Disaster movies like "Armageddon" and near misses in previous years may have scared people and alerted them to a serious issue. But when it comes to doing something about monitoring the threat, the academy concluded "there has been relatively little effort by the U.S. government."
And the U.S. government is practically the only government doing anything at all, the report found.
"It shows we have a problem we're not addressing," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, an advocacy group.
NASA calculated that to spot the asteroids as required by law would cost about $800 million between now and 2020, either with a new ground-based telescope or a space observation system, Johnson said. If NASA got only $300 million it could find most asteroids bigger than 1,000 feet across, he said.
But so far NASA has gotten neither sum.
It may never get the money, said John Logsdon, a space policy professor at George Washington University.
"The program is a little bit of a lame duck," Logsdon said. There is not a big enough group pushing for the money, he said.
At the moment, NASA has identified about five near-Earth objects that pose better than a 1-in-a-million risk of hitting our planet and being big enough to cause serious damage, Johnson said. That number changes from time to time, usually with new asteroids added and old ones removed as more information is gathered on their orbits.
The space rocks astronomers are keeping a closest eye on are a 430-foot diameter rock that has a 1-in-3,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2048 and a much-talked about asteroid, Apophis, which is twice that size and has a one-in-43,000 chance of hitting in 2036, 2037 or 2069.
Last month, NASA started a new Web site for the public to learn about threatening near-Earth objects.
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On the Net:
NASA's near-Earth object site: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch
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Jul 30, 2009 |
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Surely the dangers are evident and warrant full speed attention on an international basis. The United Nations has agressively warned about diseases, so why not warn against this most acute health hazard as well?
Besides the near earth objects, there needs to be constant surveillance of the asteroid belt and also the trailing pile of junk behind the orbit of Jupiter. The various gas giants' rings also pose as potential dangers for loose objects being knocked into earth orbit.
In the wake of the recent crash into Jupiter, it somewhat puzzles me why attention is focused almost exclusively on a solar plane. Watchful devices should look up and down as well, so to speak, for incoming threats.
I say its high time for management to step back and un-chain the creative minds of these thinkers.
In fact, many of the newly discovered ones are seen by using advanced techniques that use the bending of light by the atmosphere to see beyond the normal horizon.
Part of the politics here is that the Earth-based observation programs thus have diminishing returns, so if we really want to find them all, we'll need to build a space-based observatory. The funding would then presumably shift from one group of scientists and technicians to another, and there may be resistance to that change.
I do not know if such resistance actually exists because I've never ever read an article by anybody anywhere that brings up this transition. IMO Logsdon et al (Chapman, Yeoman, others) need to come clean on this if they truly want to find the rest of the rocks.
Short sighted, non interested, bored, egocentric, under educated, sci-fi distorted view of the world only makes it worse.
This should really be international project, because it affects us all and technology developed for asteroid protection and utilization will open gates to the sky.
The whole Chesapeake bay was originally carved out by an asteroid impact ca. 30 million years ago (simultaneous with a smaller mass extinction). It is partially filled with sediments, masking the telltale circular structure, but the impact sent tectites flying more than 1000 miles away.
As I mentioned in a letter to New Scientist many years ago, maybe we should dig up preserved asteroid fragments and put them on a permanent display, somewhere in central Washington D.C. !