UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report

szyzyg writes: "The UK NEO Task Force which was set up last year has finally delivered its report and recommendations on the Asteroid threat. The recommendations include money to build a 3 metre search telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, and more funding for research in the field. The report is written for politicians and makes a good introduction to the subject, including disturbing facts and figures."

Comments

There is a much cheaper solution

[jailbrekr2]

Just keep a team of oil rig workers on standby, in case they are needed for such an emergency....

Re:There is a much cheaper solution

[Signal 11]

That movie was so unrealistic it wasn't funny. For starters, their bomb wasn't much more than a firecracker, and for an asteroid the size of texas (astrologically speaking - very, very, unlikely) burying it a mere, what, 300 meters down, would do nothing. An asteroid in space would have a very bad case of gas for about 2 minutes and then continue happily on its merry way.

The solution isn't to try to blow it up, because those pieces are all still moving in the same direction - meaning rather than a single impact on a single continent, you now have hundred-meter sized fragments falling over the entire hemisphere, but instead to hook a space tug up to it and gently push it out of the way while it is still 0.5 AMU or so away.

Bombs don't destroy things, they merely take larger things and turn them many smaller things.

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On asteroids

[Signal 11]

Having just finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's book Hammer of God (a book I heartily recommend), I've spent alittle time thinking about this too. The question isn't if the asteroid will hit, it is when, and this report will without question bear that out.

What we need is, in addition to being able to detect them, is outposts on other planets. It is necessary for the survival of our species and if we could just get our act together long enough to stop squabbling over things like money and national debt, we could help ensure that the human race won't be snuffed out like the dinosaurs before us.

We ought to put NASA under the DoD and give it a similar budget - afterall, this IS about defense - it is defense against mother nature.

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Alternate site

[LordStrange]

SpaceRef Also has this story but with the actual paper attached in HTML.

Asteroid Risk.

[BigBlockMopar]

Yeah, and I have Firestone Radial ATX tires on my truck, too.

Oh well.

Children's astronomy book?

[blazer1024]

Okay, I just skimmed over the thing, didn't really feel like reading it, but what I see when I look at all the pretty pictures, is a children's book on astronomy.

Seriously, that's kind of what it looks like. A book geared towards 8-10 year olds. Oh, right, they said it was targeted at politicians, I should've known it was gonna look like that.

Re:Yep, we need more funding to study this

[arnie_apesacrappin]

Ahh, but here comes the big problem from the old debate days. When weighing disadvantages (usually things like genocide, nuclear war, loss of human rights, etc.) we come to a problem. How do I weigh something that has a high probability of happening to a small percent of the population (like 5% of american deaths will be caused by cancer this year [this was made up, IANAStatistician]) with a definite time frame vs something with a very small probability of happening to the entire population with an indefinite time frame (a large asteriod will kill the entire population some day)? It is a very touchy issue that can be argued in favor of either side. It comes down to we need to make the best statistical analysis (based on reports like these) that we can, and try to distribute money as fairly as possible.

And on the lighter side, I think Deep Impact taught us the best lesson: if we would have just waited for the whole thing to show up near Earth, we could have blown up the entire thing, instead of just one of the pieces we created earlier. I guess the people in Deep Impact didn't see Armageddon. If they had, they would have known to drill to 800ft, not just 100m.

Confidence Builder

[thelen]

Found a lovely quote on CNN from Britain's Science Minister Lord Sainsbury, the person responsible for forming the committee on near earth asteroids:

"We put a lot of money into astrology and I think it's sensible to put just a little bit in to making certain that we know if there is a danger of an object hitting our very fragile planet," Lord Sainsbury said.

Hmm, if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?

You mean 90 years...

[Derwen]

A quick google search for information on the asteroid which detonated over Tunguska in Siberia in June 1908 will pull up several sites, including this one (picked at random).

The problem with statistically possible events is that they do occur, and in unpredictable ways, too. The 1908 impact happened in the most emote and sparsely-populated region on the planet. As we probably won't be so lucky next time (whether it is in 1 or 10,000 years time) it is fortunate that some people recognize the problem.
- Derwen

Network of LMTs

[KjetilK]

Well, building a largish dedicated telescope is one thing, but I would rather start researching a possibility that would be much more useful, namely building a network of Liquid Mirror Telescopes. A liquid mirror telescope has a mirror of mercury that is rotating, forming a near-perfect paraboloid as it rotates. Obviously, you can't tilt the telescope, so you can't track objects like conventional telescopes, and you can't look wherever you like, you can only look straight up. The field is also pretty small, but if you put a lot of LMTs on different longitudes and latitudes, you will be able to scan most of the sky. And since LMTs come at the prize of 1/100 of the cost of a similar size of a conventional telescope, you can build a lot of them. So, say we start mass manufacturing (several hundred) 8 meter LMTs and place them all over the place.

This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.

There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well... :-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.

How big is it?

[roystgnr]

Heh...what are we going to do once we find an Asteriod that's coming to crash into earth in the next 3 to 4 years? I don't think that we have the technology to either divert the asteriod or destroy it...

How big an asteroid are you talking about? Yeah, if we discover an upcoming impact with a 10 km asteroid (or an Asteroid the Size of Texas, or God forbid a Comet the Size of a Hollywood Script Writer's Ignorance), then we're screwed. Fortunately, as the report says, those 10 km asteroids only come around every hundred million years or so. We can afford to gamble for a while.

The concern is that we'll be hit by something a couple hundred meters wide: big enough to craterize a city, small enough that we can't survey them with currently allocated resources, yet small enough that they could be pushed aside with an H-bomb if discovered early enough, or their target areas could be evacuated if they were discovered late.

Scientists Propose Telescope in Southern Hemispher

[Cy Guy]

From a BBC Article on the report:

A task force established to assess the threat of so-called Near Earth Objects (Neo's) has concluded that the risk is not science fiction but something that should be taken seriously.

The three-member team called on ministers to seek international partners to build a new £15m telescope dedicated to sweeping the skies for threatening objects.

The three-metre (9.8 feet) survey telescope, based in the Southern Hemisphere, would be designed to detect objects down to a few hundred metres across.

what about...

[Polo]

what about government mandated planet-side
airbags in case of collision?

The asteroid threat is real...

[meckardt]

although probably not especially urgent.

For reference, I offer the book "Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment" by John S. Lewis, Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., January 1995. Lewis gives a very good historic and factual overview of meteor impacts on Earth and elsewhere, and presents some interesting speculation about the actual danger to Earth from falling asteroids and comets.

Fact: meteors do hit Earth. About 1/2 are of asteroidal origin. The remainder are cometary debris. MOST break up in the atmosphere. But those are the small ones. Anything larger than a certain size will reach the ground.

Fact: Based on SpaceWatch observations, there are probably about 2000 objects larger than 1 kilometer in diameter in Near Earth Orbits. These are the civilization killers. NEO bodies larger than 0.1 km in diameter probably number over half a million. These would cause widespread devistation. (Meteor Crater, AZ was formed by an asteroidal piece about 30 meters in diameter!)

The 0.1 Km strikes occure (on average) every 100,000 years. The larger asteroids strike Earth (on average) every 100,000,000 years (with the last one suspected as being 65 million years ago). No, they don't happen very often, but they do happen. We will soon be in a position to do something about it. I, for one, would like to be able to. The first step is knowing about potential threats.

Some Extra Info + Links

[szyzyg]

Here's some extra things to look at....

My Map of all NEOs

BBC coverage of these events

My 'Musical Interpretation' of the report ;-)

The Problem with LMTs?

[Guppy]

I'm not sure if LMTs are quite as convenient as they first seem. Although such mirrors would be cheap, the amount of Mercury contain could cause a problem. There is always the possibility of accidental spills (seized bearing, clumsy grad student, etc...). More importantly, though--over time, the mirror would also lose Mercury through evaporation. Right now, there are only a few experimental LMTs, but this could pose a problem both for the astronomers as well as the local environment, if they were to become more commonplace.

Global Impact Calculator

[Alien54]

As always, when this sort of news comes out, this Sky and Telescope Magazine webpage comes in handy. It has plenty of links.

Especially useful and entertaining is this Solar System Impact Calculator, where you if you are lucky, you can help Marvin the Martian get rid of the pesky planet blocking his view of Venus. :) You can check out effects of impacts on other planets as well. Just don't make Marvin mad ...

:)

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Worst case scenario-

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Ok, first the Near Earth Asteroids are bad if they are heading for earth, but they aren't the worst, because they are mostly predictable. The worst are the extrasolar asteroids/comets that come barrelling in from outside the solar system, from the Oort cloud or beyond.

You might only get a few months warning on those at best (they mostly shine within the orbit of mars), and at worst, they come at you from the sunward direction where our telescopes can't see them. You wake up one day wondering what that wall of fire is. Or maybe we don't wake up at all.

There probably is no reasonable defense against such asteroids. Moving them- there probably is no way that can be done in that short time scale.

Think about it. This is a planet busting disaster and there is no way to save the earth.

Its not particularly likely to happen soon, but it will happen eventually. Even long period comets that come round once a millenia or so. So this time they line with the earth for the first time and...

There is one way for humans to survive however. We need to build space habitats as soon as we possibly can.

Check out:

Artemis

Neofuels

Permanent

Sleep well, don't have nightmares!