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: 2) by Spook brat on Friday June 22 2018, @04:18PM
When science catches up with our fiction and we have both gravitics and matter annihilation in our toolbox, the battleplates from Schlock Mercenary [wikia.com] are a great answer for asteroids:
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]