Status quo nasa efforts can only detect 1/3 of neo’s associated Press
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- . The agency says it has been able to complete about one-third of its assignment with the current telescope system
- AND asteroids are coming now-the impact could happen in the 21 st century
DDI 2011 1 InherencyStatus quo NASA efforts can only detect 1/3 of NEO’S Associated Press, The Associated Press (“AP”) is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. 8/12/09, Associated Press, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32387796/ns/technology_and_science-space/ WASHINGTON — NASA is charged with spotting most of the asteroids that pose a threat to Earth but does not have the money to complete the job, a U.S. government report says. That is because even though Congress assigned the space agency that mission four years ago, it never gave NASA the money to build the necessary telescopes, according to the report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, the mission calls for NASA, by the year 2020, to locate 90 percent of the potentially deadly rocks hurtling through space. The agency says it has been able to complete about one-third of its assignment with the current telescope system. NASA estimates that there are about 20,000 asteroids and comets in our solar system that are potential threats. They are larger than 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter — slightly smaller than a sports stadium in New Orleans. So far, scientists know where about 6,000 of these objects are. Rocks between 460 feet and 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) in diameter can devastate an entire region, 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 the threat. But when it comes to monitoring, the academy concluded "there has been relatively little effort by the U.S. government." And the United States 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. Below the belt NASA calculated that to spot the asteroids as required by law would mean spending 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 (300 meters) 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 Earth and being big enough to cause serious damage, Johnson said. That number changes from time to time, as new asteroids are added and old ones are removed as information is gathered on their orbits. The space rocks astronomers are keeping a closest eye on are a 430-foot (130-meter) diameter object 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. AND asteroids are coming now-the impact could happen in the 21st century Clark R. Chapman, B.S. in Astronomy, Harvard University, 1967, M.S. in Meteorology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968 Ph.D. in Planetary Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1972., 9/1/03, Global Science Form, http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/18/40/2493218.pdf More worrisome are larger meteoroids, meters to hundreds of meters across, but which are still smaller and more numerous than the km-scale asteroids being searched for by the Spaceguard Survey. As I describe below, impact rates and consequences vary enormously across this broad size range, but such objects share several general traits: (a) whether they explode in the atmosphere, on the ground, or in an ocean, they can have devastating consequences for people proximate to (or occasionally quite far from) the impact site; (b) they are mostly too small to be readily detected or tracked by existing telescopic programs; and (c) their impacts are too infrequent to be witnessed and studied in detail by scientists, so their nature and effects are not yet well characterized. Thus scientific uncertainties are greatest for just those objects whose sizes and impact frequencies should be of greatest practical concern to public officials. Impacts of these cosmic bodies are unfamiliar even to many of those in military agencies whose role is to scan the skies for more familiar military hazards. Impacts of such bodies range, depending on their size, from annual events to extremely devastating potential impacts (a 300 m impactor might cause 1 million deaths, roughly equalling the death tolls of the few largest natural disasters in the last several hundred years); the latter have a few tenths of a percent chance of happening during the 21st century. Impacts of the smaller of these bodies (several meters to 50 m) will happen (or at least might well happen) during our lifetimes, so the hazards they pose must be addressed by society’s institutions. Even the more unlikely impacts by multi-hundred meter objects have a large enough chance of happening5 during our lifetimes or our grandchildren’s, and conceivably on the "watches" of officials attending this workshop, that it would be prudent to consider how well we are prepared to deal with such an impact if one were predicted to happen in the next few years, or indeed if such a calamity were to occur without warning. 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