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 looorg on Friday June 22 2018, @12:03PM (2 children)
Sounds like a job for Space Force, or whatever the new military branch is going to be called again ... (as per usual; nothing less then Space Marines is not a proper option or answer)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @12:28PM
Sounds like the 1950s nuclear attack prep drills.
Better summarized as: stick your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday June 22 2018, @01:12PM
Exactly and the space fence is a good example why we need a space force as opposed to rando BS getting passed around.
The space fence (a big beautiful wall of 200 MHz radar) was originally a Navy project then tossed over the wall to the chair force in 04, then shut down in 2013 because contractors and retiring officers need more money and this weird side issue BS is where corruption usually lives.
So.. I kid you not, we have no operational space fence today, at least WRT unclassified fence, AFAIK.
I guess the new unclassified fence is going to be S band so ten times the resolution of the old fence, but still, its mostly "this aint our job so we'll corrupt the hell out of it for profit" type of project, that a dedicated Space Marines force would do a much better job of.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday June 22 2018, @12:14PM (9 children)
I wonder if the same paradigm takes place for celestial object collisions as it does for airplane collisions...
That is... if you see another plane, and it does not appear to move.... you are on a collision course with it. It will just get bigger and bigger until *BAM!*.
If it appears to move relative to you, all is OK. You are not on an intersecting path.
So, we are looking for a growing dark spot in the sky at night?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @12:20PM (2 children)
Surely the asteroid would have to be in geostationary orbit for this to be true? Then it wouldn't pose an immediate threat.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday June 22 2018, @12:41PM (1 child)
I was wondering if it would appear stationary in the star field as observed from earth, which isn't quite the same as a geostationary orbit.
You caught me... I misdescribed what I was questioning. You are quite right that I described a geostationary object, which isn't quite what I meant.
I was thinking more down the line of a black spot appearing in the star field, and not appearing to move within it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday June 22 2018, @12:46PM
I think, as the earth is an accelerating frame of reference, the object would move about 1 degree per day relative to the star field? I would need to draw a diagram. Or better still write a script.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday June 22 2018, @12:49PM
i would say that airplanes have speeds on the same orderof magnitude, which is not a given with asteroids.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @12:51PM
No.
Collision course with Earth means elliptical trajectory Earth is on crosses with (usually elliptical, but also may be parabolic or hyperbolic) trajectory of another celestial body, and we are both about to be sufficiently near the crosspoint at same narrow time window.
So it is more like passing the railroad crossing
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 22 2018, @12:52PM
That works only with the planes you can see. There are enough plane collisions in which neither pilots could see the other plane:
PSA Flight 182 [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @12:59PM (1 child)
Your statement is correct whenever it is valid to linearly extrapolate future motion from a short period of observation.
This holds true for aircraft in normal cruise flight but is incorrect for many other cases: aircraft on a ballistic trajectory (unusual, admittedly, I could have chosen a more common ballistic object *g*) seem to be moving away during the upward part of their curve but may still hit you later on. Orbiting objects may seem to be moving away (optically) now, but they can still hit you in ten years after curving around the sun.
So: no, we are not looking for a growing dark spot in the sky at night. We are looking for a really, really tiny *moving* dark spot in the sky at night.
Yes, you are right, that doesn't help at all.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday June 22 2018, @01:28PM
Good gosh... that makes looking for the needle in a haystack look damn easy.
In that case, we trip off on everything we can detect until we can ascertain if its path will intersect us.
To me, this seems more impossible than hopeful. If some asteroid, vectored our way through chaotic gravitic interactions in the great pinball arena of the asteroid belt, gets placed on a collision course with us, I get the strong idea that by the time we find out about it, its too late. For every one thats a threat, there has to be millions of 'em that are not a threat... or at least not in the near future. Sounds like good material for nightmares.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Friday June 22 2018, @01:17PM
Radar doppler is a thing, so with active radar you can easily detect forward/backward velocity.
Smaller things cause less damage but have more surface area for ice to vaporize off or whatevs so below a certain threshold of size or above a certain threshold of distance orbits are semi-chaotic. Haley's Comet generally returns every whatever, but having it hit a precise point, say an archery bullseye, ten laps from now is not really predictable. Kinda like the weather. It'll be hot as hell in Texas sometime in the next two months in a very general sense, but I can't tell you the exact temperature at the exact instant two weeks from now.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Friday June 22 2018, @12:42PM (3 children)
just send around a radio transmission saying "earth to outer space, all distros have adopted systemd" and watch incoming asteroids doing a 180 deg turn, duh.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @01:17PM (1 child)
*yawn*
How clever you are!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday June 23 2018, @01:51PM
1. want to come up with a joke
2. ???
3. SYSTEMD!!!
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday June 22 2018, @02:39PM
No, we're obviously safe because of Bruce Willis and his ragtag group of misfits!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(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]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 22 2018, @02:14PM
They reached this point. They were in a frenzy to deploy asteroid killers in space. Alas, they were a couple years too late. BOOOOM! The Gods of Chaos just took them all out.
(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]