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NASA won't launch a mission to hunt deadly asteroids:
NASA says it can't afford to build a space telescope considered the fastest way to identify asteroids that might impact the Earth with terrible consequences.
A 2015 law gave the space agency five years to identify 90% of near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters in diameter, which could devastate cities, regions and even civilization itself if they were to impact the planet. NASA isn't going to meet that deadline, and scientists believe they have so far only identified about a third of the asteroids considered a threat.
Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led by principal investigator Amy Mainzer, developed a proposal for a space telescope called NEOCam that would use infrared sensors to find and measure near-Earth objects. The National Academy of Sciences issued a report this spring concluding that NEOCam was the fastest way to meet the asteroid-hunting mandate. But NASA will not approve the project to begin development. "The Planetary Defense Program at NASA does not currently have sufficient funding to approve development of a full space-based NEO survey mission as was proposed by the NEOCam project," a NASA spokesperson told Quartz this week.
The agency said it was prioritizing funding for ground-based telescopes looking for asteroids, though the NAS report concluded that they would not fulfill its mandate. The agency is also funding the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission (DART), which will pilot the technologies needed to do something about any threatening near-Earth objects. Still, the agency said the infrared telescope proposed for NEOCam "could be ready for any future flight mission development effort."
Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam).
See also: Poll: Americans Want NASA To Focus More On Asteroid Impacts, Less On Getting To Mars
Related: Nathan Myhrvold Challenges NASA's NEOWISE Asteroid Results With Peer-Reviewed Paper
SpaceX Drops Protest of "Lucy" Contract, Gets Double Asteroid Redirection Test Contract
Americans Polled on Attitudes Toward the Space Program
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 06 2019, @09:03AM (2 children)
If we got the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and stopped poking Iran with a sharp stick, we could throw that money to NASA. The Brits learned that empire is expensive, why don't we?
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Saturday July 06 2019, @02:18PM
Because at the end of WW2 the British were broke, but the US MIC by contrast got rich, and has managed to stay that way irrespective of the outcomes of its various military adventures.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 06 2019, @02:57PM
Our great hope to funnel money into space activities might be to use Space Force as the back door.
As planned, Space Force would just take over functions already handled by the Air Force. So not much new there. Those functions include asteroid tracking through telescopes like the Space Surveillance Telescope [wikipedia.org] and Pan-STARRS [wikipedia.org]. Asteroids may be a secondary purpose behind tracking foreign satellites, but asteroids could be given a more prominent role (the public seems to support [npr.org] the study of asteroids over other space activities) given their planetary defense implications. Finding $500 million for something like NEOCam could be a lot easier if it is from the military budget.
Air Force is being forced to consider reusable rockets [spacenews.com] and competitive space launchers [spacenews.com]. These savings will be translated over to Space Force, so they will be getting more done for their money. Especially when BFR lands.
So you have NASA at about 0.5% of the U.S. budget [wikipedia.org]. You would love to see 1-2%. But stuffing astronomical functions into Space Force might be easier. Because as we know, boosting the military budget never goes out of style.
Beyond that, private citizens could help take over NASA's role of building/operating space stations by doing low-Earth orbit hotels. And then there's asteroid mining, which if viable will result in intense scrutiny of hundreds of asteroids. In each case, NASA can piggyback with its own science instruments.
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