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Deflection good – Detection Needed
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Deflection good – Detection NeededAsteriods detected- funding necessary to change its deathly pathMills 09 (Cynthis Mills is a veterinarian/writer, 12/17/09, “The Art of Asteriod Deflection”, http://news.discovery.com/space/near-earth-asteroid-threat.html, SH) There's really nothing to worry about. These guys have got it handled. All they need is to convince Congress they need $500 million and the international community to agree on which direction to go to push a hurtling asteroid off its path of fiery Earth annihilation. These guys are a loose association of scientists, including a retired astronaut and many work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Together they study the risk of an Earth impact from an asteroid big enough to do damage, you know, like the one that caused all the dinosaurs to become extinct. Only they don't call it an "asteroid" -- instead they use a more general term: Near Earth Object (NEO). They concentrate on anything bigger than 140 meters across (but mostly worry about the ones at least a mile across) and traveling on a trajectory that brings them within 4.6 million miles of the earth. They're watching, calculating and ready to do something. These scientists have recruited observatories like Arecibo in Puerto Rico and telescopes in Hawaii and Arizona. They use radar, honed to resolutions down to less than 10 meters to precisely image the surfaces -- looking for places to land. Now, don't conjure up the movie Armageddon for this one; they're not talking exploding the asteroid or even using a nuclear device to deflect it. These are sensitive guys with a far gentler plan -- live and let the icy-rock-of-space-death live. Plus there is too big a chance the asteroid would just reassemble -- gravity bringing the pieces back together in space and continue on its merry way. They will, however, show you a simulation of the 15 square kilometer tower of fire that happens when an asteroid hits. And show you the piece of piece of asteroid-impact-melted-Libyan-desert that was carved into a scarab for King Tut. Instead, they propose to just nudge the errant little planetoid thing. Push it a little bit faster or perhaps a little head-on bump to just slow the thing down a bit -- essentially they want to play bumper cars with asteroids; just to persuade them not to hit the earth as a 200,000-megaton fireball plus cataclysmic shock wave. We're not talking about the puny atmospheric fireball like the one that leveled 800 square miles of trees in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. That was just a little guy -- maybe 40 meters across. All we really have to do is detect the next dangerous NEO early. Say, ten years or so. Although there is no guarantee we'll get that much notice, the earth doesn't appear to be threatened by any asteroids from deep space for now. As the scientists describe it, catastrophe is just a matter of bad timing and three-dimensional space. There is only a tiny point in space and time where the orbits of the Earth and any of these near earth objects might meet. Then it comes down to whether or not they get to that point at the same time -- move either one a little faster or slower and, whoosh, just a close call. There are a lot of NEOs and these are only the ones we know about. Some 6613 have been identified, of which 800 are bigger than 1 kilometer across and about 146 are identified as PHA's ("potentially hazardous asteroids," a.k.a. "near-earth-objects-that-can-kill-us-all"). Wonderfully, there is a lovely web site called Asteroid Watch that cheerfully keeps you updated on just which one is just about to get us. You can even have this information a tweeted to you. As Don Yeomans put it, "Nothing is held back." They are happy to let us know which asteroid, say Apophis, Tootatis, Castelia or Golevka, has your and my name on it. But really, it is hard for me to tell what is more impressive, the scientific handle these scientists have on the whole fiery ball of death from space thing or their supreme confidence that, given the resources, that they can so completely handle it. As retired astronaut Rusty Schweickart put it: "It's simple, really, we can do this." A2: No PanicPanic is inevitable – asteroids are uniquely scaryChapman, 3 [Clark,, SwRI, Boulder CO USA, 9 Jan 2003, “How a near earth object might affect society”, Commissioned by the Global Science Forum, OECD, for "Workshop on Near Earth Objects: Risks, Policies, and Actions," January 2003, Frascati, Italy ] The impact hazard has captured public imagination, thanks to blockbuster motion pictures and frequent news reports of predicted "near misses," and it is now regularly used as an often humorous metaphor for the risks of modern life. Yet an impact disaster has not been experienced by anyone now alive nor are there compelling examples of such a calamity in19 human history. (Indeed, most people in the world remain wholly oblivious to this hazard and its potential manifestations.) Thus, at best, it retains a fictional, out-of-this-world character for people aware of it. However, there have been instances during the past decade -- thanks to media hyperbole or mistakes -- when the impact threat has become real for some people. Brief "mass panic" in China in December 1989 was ascribed to a mistaken, nationally televised news story. The headline-producing but mistaken predictions in March 1999 of a close encounter, and non-negligible chances for impact three decades hence, by the mile-wide asteroid 1998 XF11 (Chapman, 2000) frightened some susceptible individuals (e.g. schoolchildren) around the world. Thus there is every expectation that, as risk perception experts have forecast, a predicted or actual impact event might elicit the often exaggerated reactions evoked by the subset of risks classified as uncontrollable, involuntary, fatal, catastrophic, and "dreadful" in the risk perception literature (Slovic, 1987); other features of the impact hazard that predict exaggerated public concern are that it is a newly recognized hazard, due to unobservable agents, as well as a perception that the risk is increasing (the latter isn’t actually true, but the augmented telescopic discovery programs are finding "near miss" objects ever more frequently, and the news media are reporting them). We may hope that such widespread apprehension as when the Earth passed harmlessly through the tail of Halley’s Comet in 1910 may not recur in our enlightened, modern times. However, momentous cosmic events often evoke religious or superstitious connections for many people (the titles of two science fiction novels dealing with cosmic impacts exemplify such themes: Niven and Pournelle’s "Lucifer’s Hammer" and Arthur C. Clarke’s "The Hammer of God"). The predicted fiery, but almost certainly harmless, atmospheric re-entry of the Skylab space module in 1979 caused public concern in many nations; efforts at public education may have helped lessen similar fears prior to the re-entry of the larger Mir space station in 2001. However, these real space-related events may be less relevant as analogs for public reaction to many of the more substantial impact scenarios discussed here than such larger natural disasters as the ten-or-so that have each killed more than 10,000 people (a few over 100,000) in the last three decades, or than the horrors of mass terrorism, war, genocide, or epidemic. Asteroids are unique – September 11 proves overreactionChapman, 4 [Clark, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder CO, “The hazard of near-Earth asteroid impacts on earth” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 222 (2004) 1 – 15 ] It is subjective to compare the impact hazard, given its inherent low-probability high-consequence character, with other societal hazards. I consider mortality rather than property damage as being more central to fears of impacts. But neither mortality nor economic loss estimates provide a good forecast of how societies respond to different kinds of hazards. The f 3000 deaths from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 had dramatic national and international consequences (involving economics, politics, war, etc.), while a similar number of U.S. highway fatalities during the same month were hardly noticed, except by family members and associates of the deceased. Risk perception expert Paul Slovic believes that asteroid impacts have many elements of a ‘‘dreadful’’ hazard (being perceived as being involuntary, fatal, uncontrollable, catastrophic and increasing [increasing in news reports, anyway]), like terrorism or nuclear threats, in contrast with more mundane hazards that may be more serious measured by objective criteria [67]. Society often spends much—even orders of magnitude— more per life saved to reduce ‘‘dreadful’’ hazards than mundane ones. For this reason, efforts to reduce the impact hazard and to plan for mitigation (e.g., evacuation of ground zero, storing food supplies in order to survive a global agricultural disaster or developing capabilities to deflect a threatening NEO) may be perceived by many citizens as money well spent. On the other hand, Slovic’s public opinion polls show that many others regard the impact hazard as being trivial. 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