Status quo nasa efforts can only detect 1/3 of neo’s associated Press

A2: Politics DA

Under the Bush Administration, a threat analysis matrix was used that divided possible conflicts according to probability and effects. Low-level global terrorism, for example, was regarded as highly likely to occur often but its effects were not seen as been in the same class with, say, a nuclear blast in downtown New York. This was the basis on which some of the early thinking that was done to study what might happen if an asteroid posed a risk to hit the Earth. The threat of a catastrophic celestial hit against planet Earth carries little political weight, due to a lack of media interest and the fact that the problem does not fit into any of the normal government structures. As a planning tool this matrix had its uses, but it lacked the ability to give political weight to the various threats. From the point of view of the US president and his administration, a low-level hostage seizure may or may not be a major event, depending on who the hostage is and how media-savvy the terrorists involved are.

It’s good to see asteroid deflection occasionally popping up in the news, thanks to the efforts of people like former astronaut Rusty Schweickart, whose efforts as co-chairman of the Task Force on Planetary Defense of the NASA Advisory Council are complemented by his work for non-profits like the B612 Foundation. Schweickart is worried about the potential consequences of even a small asteroid impact, pointing to the Tunguska event of 1908, in which 800 square miles of Siberian forest were flattened in the kind of strike that occurs every 200 to 300 years.

Bigger asteroids are, obviously, a far greater danger, and while they’re much rarer, they do have the capability of wiping out entire species, as may well have occurred some 65 million years ago in the destruction of the dinosaurs. In his recent New York Times article, Schweickart notes what we need to do:

With a readily achievable detection and deflection system we can avoid their same fate. Professional (and a few amateur) telescopes and radar already function as a nascent early warning system, working every night to discover and track those planet-killers. Happily, none of the 903 we’ve found so far seriously threaten an impact in the next 100 years.

Nonetheless, asteroids demand a constant vigilance. Schweickart continues:

Although catastrophic hits are rare, enough of these objects appear to be or are heading our way to require us to make deflection decisions every decade of so.

A deflection capacity is something NASA needs to be looking at, and the report of the Task Force on Planetary Defense urges that financing for it be added to the NASA budget. Schweickart believes that $250 to $300 million, added annually over the next ten years, would allow our inventory of near-Earth asteroids to be completed and a deflection capability to be developed, after which a maintenance budget ($50 to $75 million per year) would keep us tuned up for potential deployment

(Brent William, Head of Emergent Space Technologies, and Wallace T. Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, “Spacecraft Mission Design for the Optimal Impulsive Deflection of Hazardous Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) using Nuclear Explosive Technology” 2007, www.nss.org/resources/library/planetarydefense/index.htm/HT)