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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

NASA held a teleconference on Wednesday [nasa.gov] to mark the release of a multiagency report [nasa.gov] 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 [qz.com], 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 [nasa.gov] (pdf) produced by the Obama administration into a set of coordinated goals [whitehouse.gov] (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.

[...] 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 [nasa.gov] 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.

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