Planetary Defense: Protecting Earth from Asteroids

securitas writes "Space.com has published a feature about developing a planetary defense against catastrophic comet and asteroid impacts. The story arises from the aptly named 'Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids' held in California February 23-26. The article discusses potential methods to prevent an impact, the need for study missions to comets and asteroids, the to-date haphazard approach to monitoring Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and the NASA/US Air Force Spaceguard Survey, which aims to discover and track 90% of 'Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with a diameter greater than 0.6 miles (1-kilometer) by 2008.' Some ideas for anti-impact technologies to develop include gas blasts, nuclear detonations, ramming microsatellites, lasers, mass drivers and gravitational tractor beams. The most disturbing message from the conference? 'It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger. Mirror at USA Today."

Comments

Re:Low priority?

[Klerck]

But how important will famine, disease, and war be when 90% of the population has been wiped out by a massive asteroid and the effects after the collision? I'd say this is far more important.

These problems are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Bad idea?

[jaysedai]

Shortly before Carl Sagan died, he wrote an article in Parade Magazine about how he felt this was a bad idea. His premise being that a rouge government or terrorist organization could use technology like this to turn a "near miss" into a direct hit. Which could be potentially far more destructive than a nuke. Obviously he's looking well into the future. But I think he has point.

Saving ourselves from famine, disease, war

[handy_vandal]

Famine, disease, and war are way more important, and require more of our attention.

Famine, disesase, and war could all be ended in a moment -- by a sufficiently large asteroid.

Gallows humor aside, I'm sorry to say it but: why should we realistically expect an end to famine, disease, war? They've been with us throughout history. Man has always wished to eliminate these woes -- yes they keep getting worse and worse.

At least there's the possibility that a technological fix might save us from asteroid impact. Give me some reason to believe that there's any kind of fix for war etc.

-kgj

Geo (or larger) Politics and the human condition

[Space cowboy]

Back in April 2002, the UK government started to fund a centre studying both the near-earth-orbit rocks we know about, and ways of increasing awareness and detection rates, as well as investigating possible protection strategies.

Personally I think it's just playing at people-politics, at least in the form the UK has done it $600k isn't going to go very far, but it's a relatively cheap purchase of public goodwill... On the other hand, at the moment I'll take what we can get.

There's a tiny chance of life as we know it being destroyed. A really tiny chance, and one thing humans aren't good at is disaster-planning - even when the potential result is extinction, the "gut-feeling" is to say "it'll never happen", because none of us have any experience of it happening. This is short-sighted, we should be doing something.

Although I don't think there's any reason to panic about it, the last great ecosystem was destroyed by (perhaps two, perhaps 1) asteroid, as far as we know. Researching, thinking, creating plans would probably be a good idea, at least IMHO.

Simon

The Tin Foil Hats Say

[Alien54]

As seen in this article featuring the testimony of Dr Carol Rosin. Dr Carol Rosin was the first woman corporate manager of Fairchild Industries and was spokesperson for Wernher Von Braun in the last years of his life. She founded the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space in Washington DC and has testified before Congress on many occasions about space based weapons. Von Braun revealed to Dr Rosin a plan to justify weapons in spaced based on hoaxing an extraterrestrial threat. She was also present at meetings in the '70s when the scenario for the Gulf War of the '90s was planned.

• As practically a deathbed speech, he educated me about those concepts and who the players were in this game. He gave me the responsibility, since he was dying, of continuing this effort to prevent the weaponization of outer space.

  When Wernher Von Braun was dying of cancer, he asked me to be his spokesperson, to appear on occasions when he was too ill to speak. I did this. What was most interesting to me was a repetitive sentence that he said to me over and over again during the approximately four years that I had the opportunity to work with him.

  He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had "killer satellites". We were told that they were coming to get us and control us-that they were "Commies."

  Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify third-world country "crazies." We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.

  The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.

  Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.

  And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card.

  "And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie."

  I think I was too naive at that time to know the seriousness of the nature of the spin that was being put on the system. And now, the pieces are starting to fall into place. We are building a space-based weapons system on a premise that is a lie, a spin. Wernher Von Braun was trying to hint that to me back in the early 70's and right up until the moment when he died in 1977.

Be sure your Tin Foil hats are well grounded