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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday June 30 2015, @11:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the overlooked-and-underfunded dept.

Asteroid threats seems only taken seriously when the last close call is fresh in memory. But it didn't last long enough to establish consistent funding. On March 23, 1989, when an asteroid 300 meters in diameter called 1989FC passed within 684 000 kilometers from Earth. New York Times wrote, "In cosmic terms, it was a close call." This event also woke up the powers that were after this arguably close brush with total annihilation. The US Congress asked NASA to prepare a report on the threat posed by asteroids. The document from 1992, "The Spaceguard Survey: Report of the NASA International Near-Earth-Object Detection Workshop," was rather bleak.

If a large Near-Earth Object (NEO) were to hit the Earth, the report said, its denizens could look forward to acid rain, firestorms, and an impact winter induced by dust being thrown kilometers into the stratosphere. After reports from the National Research Council made it clear that meeting the discovery requirement outlined in the Congressional mandate was impossible given the lack of program funding, NEOO got a tenfold budget increase from 2009 to 2014. Yet it still faces a number of difficulties. An audit of the program released September 2014 described the NEOO program as "a one-man operation that is poorly integrated and lacking in objectives and oversight".


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @05:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @05:27PM (#203846)

    It isn't "self proclaimed". It becomes de facto because everyone else in the West sits on their hands and waits for the US to do something, especially the EU. Well, that's not fair. They don't sit on their hands, they wring their hands and issue strongly worded proclamations. Russia rolling into Ukraine? We'll shame them to leave. In Kosovo you had ethnic cleansing and holocaust. It was in their own fucking backyard and they didn't do shit until the US stepped in. A million people murdered in Rwanda and they didn't do shit except to officially say that what was going on was bad and that if it didn't stop, someone ought to do something about it.

    The EU WANTS the US to be the police. That way they don't need to make the sacrifices or make the hard decisions. They don't need to maintain a large military infrastructure nor presence anywhere. They can send in (after much arm twisting) their token troops for patrols and contribute behind the scenes. They get security, and they get to hypocritically complain about US presence. Win-win!

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