SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
NASA held a teleconference on Wednesday to mark the release of a multiagency report on how the U.S. government plans to deal with asteroids that could strike Earth. Although not all potentially threatening near-Earth objects have been found, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the National Science Foundation plan to invest in new telescopes capable of detecting more:
NASA is not going to be able to find all the asteroids big enough to cause serious devastation on Earth by 2020—or even 2033. Also: For a hypothetical attempt to send a spacecraft to divert an seriously dangerous incoming asteroid, we'll need a ten year heads-up to build it and get it to the asteroid.
The good news? They're working on it. "If a real threat does arise, we are prepared to pull together the information about what options might work and provide that information to decision-makers," Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, told reporters.
The meat of the announcement today from was the conversion of a 2016 strategy document (pdf) produced by the Obama administration into a set of coordinated goals (pdf) across the government, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Department of Energy. Sensible stuff— figuring out how better to track asteroids; predict their behavior; re-route or break them apart; and work better with international partners to routinely improve the world's ability to do this.
[...] NASA, under orders from Congress, is focused on finding asteroids bigger than 140 meters across—that is, those that are large enough to devastate an entire region. We still have a lot to do in that regard, per Johnson, who says that “we’ve found about 8,000 near-Earth asteroids at least 140 meters across, but two thirds of such objects remain to be discovered.”
[...] The amount of funds available for Planetary Protection is increasing, with the Trump administration requesting $150 million from lawmakers next year, mostly to fund a mission to demonstrate a spacecraft called DART that could deflect an Earth-bound asteroid. But strangely, Johnson would not discuss specific technologies for hunting asteroids during the media briefing on the report.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @12:59PM (1 child)
Your statement is correct whenever it is valid to linearly extrapolate future motion from a short period of observation.
This holds true for aircraft in normal cruise flight but is incorrect for many other cases: aircraft on a ballistic trajectory (unusual, admittedly, I could have chosen a more common ballistic object *g*) seem to be moving away during the upward part of their curve but may still hit you later on. Orbiting objects may seem to be moving away (optically) now, but they can still hit you in ten years after curving around the sun.
So: no, we are not looking for a growing dark spot in the sky at night. We are looking for a really, really tiny *moving* dark spot in the sky at night.
Yes, you are right, that doesn't help at all.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday June 22 2018, @01:28PM
Good gosh... that makes looking for the needle in a haystack look damn easy.
In that case, we trip off on everything we can detect until we can ascertain if its path will intersect us.
To me, this seems more impossible than hopeful. If some asteroid, vectored our way through chaotic gravitic interactions in the great pinball arena of the asteroid belt, gets placed on a collision course with us, I get the strong idea that by the time we find out about it, its too late. For every one thats a threat, there has to be millions of 'em that are not a threat... or at least not in the near future. Sounds like good material for nightmares.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]