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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @01:19PM (1 child)
If we ever needed a reason to boost human presence in space and build extraterrestrial space vessel industry capable of building large, spacious, well shielded, fast, nuclear fission power source propelled, never-ascending to planetary gravity wells spaceships, the need to protect our home planet from disastrous collisions through extensive exploration and mapping of Solar system's smaller objects, deployment and maintenance of large network of early detection and monitoring sensors at sufficient distance from Sun (e.g. in Mars orbit), and, when necessary, fast intervention, is quite compelling.
We may not be able to terraform other planets and make them our backup semipermanent home, but still we have a justified interest in conquering interplanetary distances for the same sake - of our sustained survival, on this planet.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 22 2018, @06:41PM
Asteroids that hit Earth are also like big wads of money that turn into dust and smoke.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]