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Title    Only Dedicated Comet-Spotting Program in Southern Hemisphere Shuts Down
Date    Friday October 24 2014, @11:30PM
Author    Blackmoore
Topic   
from the cosmic-billiards dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/10/24/1912235

JNCF writes:

The Gaurdian reports that Australia's comet-spotting program lost funding and shut down last year,

The Earth has been left with a huge blind spot for potentially devastating comet strikes after the only dedicated comet-spotting program in the southern hemisphere lost its funding, leading astronomers have warned.

The program, which discovered the Siding Spring comet, was shut down last year after losing funding.

“It’s a real worry,” Bradley Tucker, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and University of California Berkeley, told Guardian Australia.

“There could be something hurtling towards us right now and we wouldn’t know about it.”

The Siding Spring survey – named after the observatory near Coonabarabran in central New South Wales, where the Mars comet was first spotted – was the only program in the southern hemisphere actively searching for potentially hazardous comets, asteroids and meteors.

It seems that the Gaurdian is running this story now because the program had previously spotted a comet that came close to Mars on Sunday, but this is the first I remember hearing about it.

Links

  1. "JNCF" - https://soylentnews.org/~JNCF/
  2. "Australia's comet-spotting program lost funding and shut down last year," - http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/20/funding-cuts-leave-earth-with-blind-spot-for-potentially-catastrophic-comets
  3. "Siding Spring comet" - http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/20/comet-siding-spring-skims-close-to-mars-after-million-year-journey

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