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Private Efforts Fill Gaps In Earth's Asteroid Defenses
Hugh Pickens sends us to Seed Magazine for an update on Earth's defenses against collisions with near-earth objects (NEOs). The bottom line is that government is moving slowly on cataloging NEOs but private bodies are picking up some of the slack. "In 2005, the US Congress directed NASA to catalog 90 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs greater than 140 meters in diameter by the year 2020 but NASA has yet to allot funds to the project. Increasingly, coordinated private efforts are working to fill the gap in Earth's NEO defenses. Earlier this year, Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi donated a combined $30 million to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), keeping it on track for first light in 2014. LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy and by opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move, the LSST will also detect and catalog NEOs."
Check out Orbital Debris Quarterly News at http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter.html They have back issues in pdf
Keep Bruce Willis near by just in case
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Given that they don't seem to be able to afford $3mil to make a game (Link) it seems pretty funny in a not really funny sort of way that they don't seem to be able to allot funds to this project either.
Maybe someone is trying to make some money off interest. @_@
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Any serious private or public effort in funding Earth's defenses against asteroids should pay special attention to the Arecibo Observatory. Besides the fact the observatory is facing serious funding issues (funding was cut to less than half of the regular funding bringing the possibility of actually closing down the facility), Arecibo is one of the best (if not THE best) facilities in the world for tracking asteroids (as a matter of fact the Arecibo Observatory has the biggest, most sensible radio telescope in the world). It is just a shame the effects the war has brought upon ourselves.
A term like asteroid defense, to me, always brings up the image of a battery of laser cannons or special nuclear silo's that actually -defend- us against asteroids. Wouldn't it be more appropriatly dull to call this asteroid observation?
+1 Funny Signature
I would be surprised if we (United States) ever make it to the Mars/Moon on such a shoestring budget that we have today. Unless we have a dramatic budget shift towards the sciences (and away from wars *cough* *cough*), I see commercial/private interests as our next great funding source for space science and transport. Eventually we will probably have manned moon missions that are completely commercial and privately owned/funded. However NASA's technology right now is lightyears ahead of what any company can do (unless Lockheed Martin and Boeing join the commercial space race). I guess we'll be seeing more philanthropic donations to the space sciences in the future.
Gates only contributed the money to LSST so they would run vista on it
Nice city you have here. What a pity, 99942 Apophis going to wipe it out in decade. However for couple of billion we can change its course a little. What ? According to your date you are safe ? Believe me it's going to hit you. We have just installed propulsion system on it's surface.
I'm of the thought that it doesn't really matter what sort of 'defenses' humanity sets up.
If a killer asteroid is headed our way, may as well accept fate.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
In 2005, the US Congress directed NASA to catalog 90 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs greater than 140 meters in diameter by the year 2020
Now, if I were a NASA decision maker, I'd put that job off too. Considering there are still 12 years to go before the deadline, the likelihood that technology developments will make the job faster, easier and cheaper probably exceeds 100%.
With all the competition from the private sector, getting a telescope into space dedicated to imaging asteroids will almost certainly be cheaper. And a space telescope should be more effective than a ground based one, even with adaptive optics. CIGS image sensors were just announced recently, with superb low light performance, exactly what's needed for low albedo object discovery. Lightweight foamed metal and graphite materials that have potential uses in mirrors are making progress, as is computing power and artificial intelligence. So, in 5 years, chances are NASA would be able to put together a package that does the job better, faster and at a lower price than anything they could do today.
Assuming a pair of 2 meter telescopes on a single orbiting platform, with a 25 minute exposure time and 5 minute re-aiming time, and a 1.5 degree field of view. Each scope could image a 1 degree square every 30 minutes. Or 24 degrees per day. Or a 360 degree circle in 15 days. Or 5 degrees above and below the ecliptic plane twice in under a year. With overlap. 2 years for a more comprehensive +/- 10 degree survey.
So, yeah. With 12 years remaining to complete a job that'll take 2 years, and the longer you wait the cheaper it gets, no wonder NASA hasn't budgeted anything for it.
What about Meteors Or Rocks Presently Headed Earthwards Unless Stopped (MORPHEUS)?
In 2005, Congress Directed NASA to go do the work. No, they didn't just sit on the money. As a part of this work, Congress sent a few million to the Air Force to manage the University of Hawaii's NEO detector project, PanSTARRS.
The planning kicked off at about the same time as the LSST, but being significantly cheaper and using off the shelf optics with custom gigapixel detectors, a testbed has already been deployed on Maui. When the full system is deployed atop Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii, it'll include four scopes ganged together, putting 4 X 1.4GPix on a patch of sky. The redundant detectors allow for added error correction from bad pixels, cosmic ray strikes, and whatnot.
Now that the LSST has some significant seed money, we may soon be able to reap the benefits of two panoptic sky survey systems. That's going to be a hell of a lot of near-real time data processing.
Luke, help me take this mask off
That's like during a hearing regarding alkali runoff and the effect on the pH of lakes a scientist said that their goal was to get the pH down to 7 by next year. A politician says, "That's unacceptable - we want it down to 0 by next year!".
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
> The bottom line is that government is moving slowly on cataloging NEOs
NASA's NEO program catalogs bodies as soon as the data comes available.
There are 7 programs besides NASA searching and/or cataloging (they're listed on JPL's site: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/programs/ ). When one team gets data, they all share in it. The programs are only as slow as the data. As for US government, 5.5 of the 8 programs are US based (one in Italy, one in Japan, one joint US-Aussie).
> NASA has yet to allot funds to the project
The NASA NEO program is run from JPL.
JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
NASA pays JPL to do so.
The 8 people in the NEO program appear to be all NASA employees, or at least from Caltech or other universities, paid by NASA (directly via payroll or JPL funding, or indirectly via funding to their parent university) to work there. There is no need to have funding dedicated explicitly to the program if existing funding is available to operate the office under other funding headings.
The government is perhaps not moving as fast as it could in data collection if it funded a dedicated telescopy program directly, but that doesn't imply the cataloging is slow.
The bottom line is that the article is correct in that private concerns are providing funding for or operating search and/or cataloging operations, but that's all. The assertions regarding cataloging being slow and lack of funding are unfounded.
Of course any government funded program will tell you there's a "lack" in terms of not enough (as opposed to an absence), because they'll get their funding cut if they don't show the need. The output from this program indicates it's operating its cataloging project at the speed necessary to keep up with the data.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B