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A2: Hype

This isn’t hype, the NEO threat is real and imminent – scientists and engineers prove.


Flight International, 04, March 30, 2004, Reed Business Information US, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc., “Deep impact; How serious a threat do near Earth objects pose, and what is being done to prevent the devastation that a collision would inevitably cause?,” Lexis Nexis, 6/22/11,CF

On 18 March a mysterious object raced across the evening sky over the South Atlantic. Large enough to destroy a city, a 30m (100ft)-plus diameter rock with an energy equivalent to a 0.5 megaton bomb brushed past the Earth and hurtled onwards through space. Only two months earlier, the NASA-funded Spaceguard telescope spotted a massive asteroid on an apparent collision course with the planet. With around 24h to go before the estimated impact in the northern hemisphere, astronomers recalculated the near Earth object's (NEO) trajectory and discovered that it would clearly miss the planet. Although this all sounds familiar as the fodder for science fiction writers and "doomsday" movie scripts, the threat to Earth from NEOs is real and immediate, says an international group of scientists and engineers. They hope that news of these two recent incidents, plus revelations of the frequency of other near misses, will be a wake-up call to the international community. "The public has to learn we are living in a shooting gallery," says a delegate at the first American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics planetary defence conference held recently in California. With input from the conference, the group is drawing up a "white paper" to help guide what it hopes will be a blueprint for the first organised global defence against asteroids and comets. How real is the threat? Some NEOs -- like the 10km (6.2 miles)-diameter Cretaceous-Tertiary asteroid judged to have possibly led to the extinction of the dinosaurs -- are large enough to destroy the human species, while many smaller ones have the potential to wreak nuclear weapon-like havoc. Previous collisions Large NEOs are known to have hit the planet more than 139 times and evidence exists of more than 93 craters between 5km and 200km in diameter. In 2002 three NEOs came close to the Earth, two of which were not discovered until after they had passed. As recently as 13 January a large NEO, now estimated to be around 500m in diameter, was discovered approaching the planet. Then there are the smaller NEOs, such as the one that grazed the atmosphere on 18 March, which have the potential to cause disaster if they are misinterpreted by a tense nation as a nuclear attack. Outgoing US Air Force Space Command development and transformation director Brig Gen Pete Worden describes one such incident on 6 June 2002 when a "small NEO impact" of around 10 megaton equivalent size lit up the night sky as it exploded in the atmosphere over the Mediterranean. "We were in the middle of a crisis situation as Pakistan and India were at loggerheads with each other. What would have happened if that had gone off over New Delhi or Islamabad? Neither country has the ability to clearly define what has happened. This is the kind of NEO issue we need to deal with -- it's not just about dinosaur bones." A recommendation of the conference will call for the funding of a next-generation Spaceguard survey effort (originally set up with NASA funding in 1998) to detect and catalogue potentially hazardous NEOs larger than 140m, a move em-braced within a bill introduced in the US Congress on 11 February. Similar actions are under way in Europe with plans to support NEO surveys from advanced 3m-class telescopes in the Canary Islands. The US Department of Defense will be asked to speed up the release of data on NEOs and meteorites, particularly over areas where unexpected high-altitude detonations could be misinterpreted. Tracking the threat Thanks largely to NASA's Spaceguard survey conducted through the MIT-Lincoln Lab military telescope in New Mex-ico, and mostly amateur astronomers, more than 680 NEOs with diameters greater than 1km have been discovered and tracked. Between 300 and 500 NEOs in this class are estimated to exist, but remain undetected, says NASA. An estimated 200,000 of the smaller NEOs in the 100m diameter range also await discovery and tracking. One of the expected recommendations from the conference is the need to establish a globally recognised authority or "home" for the planetary defence initiative, as well as the setting up of a chain-of-command structure to handle detec-tion, threat verification, countermeasures and alerting.

A2: SQ Deflection Solves




NASA has no planetary defense program now


Easterbrook ‘8 (Gregg, Editor of The Atlantic and The New Republic and Sr. Fellow at Brookings, “The Sky is Falling,” June, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/asteroids)

Given the scientific findings, shouldn’t space rocks be one of NASA’s priorities? You’d think so, but Dallas Abbott says NASA has shown no interest in her group’s work: “The NASA people don’t want to believe me. They won’t even listen.” NASA supports some astronomy to search for near-Earth objects, but the agency’s efforts have been piecemeal and underfunded, backed by less than a tenth of a percent of the NASA budget. And though altering the course of space objects approaching Earth appears technically feasible, NASA possesses no hardware specifically for this purpose, has nearly nothing in development, and has resisted calls to begin work on protection against space strikes. Instead, NASA is enthusiastically preparing to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on a manned moon base that has little apparent justification. “What is in the best interest of the country is never even mentioned in current NASA planning,” says Russell Schweick­art, one of the Apollo astronauts who went into space in 1969, who is leading a campaign to raise awareness of the threat posed by space rocks. “Are we going to let a space strike kill millions of people before we get serious about this?” he asks. In January, I attended an internal NASA conference, held at agency headquarters, during which NASA’s core goals were presented in a PowerPoint slideshow. Nothing was said about protecting Earth from space strikes—not even researching what sorts of spacecraft might be used in an approaching-rock emergency. Goals that were listed included “sustained human presence on the moon for national preeminence” and “extend the human presence across the solar system and beyond.” Achieving national preeminence—isn’t the United States pretty well-known already? As for extending our presence, a manned mission to Mars is at least decades away, and human travel to the outer planets is not seriously discussed by even the most zealous advocates of space exploration. Sending people “beyond” the solar system is inconceivable with any technology that can reasonably be foreseen; an interstellar spaceship traveling at the fastest speed ever achieved in space flight would take 60,000 years to reach the next-closest star system. After the presentation, NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, came into the room. I asked him why there had been no discussion of space rocks. He said, “We don’t make up our goals. Congress has not instructed us to provide Earth defense. I administer the policy set by Congress and the White House, and that policy calls for a focus on return to the moon. Congress and the White House do not ask me what I think.” I asked what NASA’s priorities would be if he did set the goals. “The same. Our priorities are correct now,” he answered. “We are on the right path. We need to go back to the moon. We don’t need a near-Earth-objects program.” In a public address about a month later, Griffin said that the moon-base plan was “the finest policy framework for United States civil space activities that I have seen in 40 years.”




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