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First Dedicated Asteroid-Tracking Satellite Will Be Canadian

Posted by Soulskill on from the nobody-expects-the-asteroid-inquisition dept.

cylonlover writes "In the wake of the meteor blast over Russia and the close-quarter flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14 last week, many people's thoughts have turned to potential dangers from above. It is timely then that the Canadian Space Agency will next week launch NEOSSat (Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite), the world's first space telescope for detecting and tracking asteroids, satellites and space debris." The meteor incident in Russia has spurred interested in asteroid defense across the globe; donations are pouring in for asteroid-related projects, government officials are making a show of seeming interested, and researchers are stepping up their efforts. Unfortunately, as a related article at Wired notes, we're still a long, long way from having anything more than early warning systems. Quoting: "A new endeavor coming online in 2015 named the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System Project (ATLAS) will provide an early warning system that could provide one week’s notice for city-destroying 45-meter asteroids and three week’s notice for potentially devastating 140-meter objects. ... A more targeted effort comes from the B612 Foundation, which plans to launch the Sentinel telescope in late 2016. This spacecraft would sit inside the orbit of Venus and constantly be on the lookout for killer asteroids, whichever direction they come from. Sentinel will spot nearly all asteroids 150 meters or larger and identify a significant portion of those down to 30 meters in diameter."

14 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Canadian? by TWX · · Score: 3, Funny

    Canadian, eh?

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  2. Not Quite by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It is timely then that the Canadian Space Agency will next week launch NEOSSat (Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite), ....

    I think it should be that the CSA will have someone else launch NEOSSat.

  3. Misplaced priorities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Humanity survives 100,000 years without being annihilated by meteors, but now a meteor has struck in Russia and we need to panic and have a meteor defense system up in 10 years? Sorry, but the probabilities have not changed. If you want to save humanity, focus on eliminating bio-weapons and nuclear weapons. Those are the threats that could eliminate humanity in 50 years. Meteors--probably not*.

    * And I know that I'm going to be flamed by those who say "what if". The same argument has been used to sink nuclear power and support anti-terrorism policies. Risk management means evaluating even catastrophic risks in deterministic terms--i.e. there is no absolute values (yes/no).

    1. Re:Misplaced priorities by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Based on your message, I wonder how they were able to pull this type of project together in 10 days!

      Obviously someone up there has been interested in this problem since well before the Russia incident.

    2. Re:Misplaced priorities by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Interesting

      We already have a lot of resources going to dealing with nuclear weapons and bioweapons. Meanwhile, after the fall of the USSR, the chance of a full scale nuclear war went down a lot. And there may even be benefits from many countries having nukes- there's the notion of "nuclear peace" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_peace- once a few countries have nukes, they are less likely to go to war with each other. In contrast, we have very little going to deal with asteroids and other existential risk threats from space, so we might as well put some resources into it, especially given that asteroid tracking telescopes will also give us interesting scientific data.

      Your basic point does however have some validity. There's the serious problem of the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. That is, something apparently makes advanced civilizations very rare. It is possible that most of the filtration stopping civilizations occurs before they reach our tech level (e.g. need for life to arise, need for complex life to arise, need for intelligent life to arise, need for civilization to arise, etc.) However, there's a definite possibility that much of the Filter is in front of us and not behind us. If that's the case, Filtration likely needs to occur very soon (next few centuries) since once we're spread out a bit in space, destroying or severely setting back our whole civilization will be much tougher. This narrow window suggests that most of the civilization destroying events we need to worry about are ones that will be created by us, and not natural ones, since natural ones are just so rare. So while we're clearly not putting enough resources into investigating and preventing existential risks, it is possible that almost all the resources we put in should focus on the tech-based ones.

    3. Re:Misplaced priorities by sunderland56 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Dinosaurs survived 135 million years without being annihilated. Their last words were "Damn, I wish we'd done something".

    4. Re:Misplaced priorities by Arker · · Score: 2

      "Nuclear peace" or as it was called a few decades back, MAD, works fairly well. It's sort of an extension of the old dictum that a well-armed people are a polite people. The problem is that nuclear weapons are so powerful and indiscriminate in effect that it only needs to fail once to have catastrophic effects planet-wide. This makes it very dangerous.

      However the rest of the world is hardly going to give up on their nukes when the US wont. And the US pays lip-service to disarmament and the NPL but goes no further toward any real disarmament; it demonizes Iran, one of the few countries with nuclear technology that is actually a signatory to, and in compliance with, the NPL, while treating Israel, Pakistan, and India who declined to sign and went ahead and produced their own nuclear weapons instead, much better. This policy obviously makes some sense in terms of domestic politics, and that's why it's not likely to change anytime soon, but it's making the world a much more dangerous place.

      The problem here isnt resources. It's will. There is no political will to change the situation in the political classes inside the worlds most heavily armed nation, and therefore everyone else, inside that nation and outside, is left to pray that MAD continues to be 100% effective. 99.9% just isnt good enough in this case.

      --
      =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
      Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
    5. Re:Misplaced priorities by Sentrion · · Score: 2

      As far as probabilities are concerned, meteor and asteroid impacts are actually quite common. A large asteroid or commet hit Siberia just 100 years ago and caused devastation for hundreds of square miles. Such an impact in a densely populated region would wipe out thousands or millions of people. As far as odds are concerned we are due for another large collision. As a society we have already committed ourselves to exploring space and making use of satellites for practical needs, why not this as well? We have Tsunami advanced detection and warning systems, so why not have the same for asteroids? Back when the first Tsunami warning systems were installed your argument could have been just as valid then, since Tsunamis don't happen every day, and warning systems can't always guarantee people can get to safe heights in time (ie the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami). And of all the known Tsunamis that have wiped out entire cities and coastlines and tens of thousands of people throughout human history, how many of these might have been caused by a large meteor hitting the ocean?

      Now, suppose this satellite is just the beginning of a permanent program that monitors near earth space for signs of approaching objects. Say it continues for 200 years from now with no potential collisions detected, but then it catches one, gives enough warning to either take action on the object or evacuate the area that will be affected by the collision. Suppose hundreds of thousands of lives are saved? Is it then worth the cost? And I would point out that if the money isn't going into this program it would go to some other program, like the effect of low gravity on milk production in goats, or some other nonsense. Even with a meteor warning system scientists would still use the satellite to study and learn, which may become very useful down the road. It's certainly no worse than the money being thrown at the CERN program.

    6. Re:Misplaced priorities by Sentrion · · Score: 2

      All I said was "due". There is a difference beween stating we are due for a probabilistic event and saying that any one day the odds are greater than the previous (ie observing that after getting three tails in a row we are "due" for a heads in a coin toss, though it is known that the odds for each toss are always 50% and you could have 50 turns and still have tails, though having 50 tails in a row would be an unlikely occurrence). You may be guilty of the reverse gambler's fallacy if you think that we are safe just because it's been thousands of years since the last major event.

      The threshold for an impact that causes widespread global mortality and threatens civilization almost certainly lies between about 0.5 and 5 km diameter, perhaps near 2 km. The energy released by an impactor depends on diameter, density, velocity, and angle. Impacts of objects this large occur from one to several times per million years, but the last known climate changing collision was believed to have hit Argentina 3.3 million years ago. So the last known incidence of this magnitude was 3.3 million years ago, but statistically we should have been hit two or three times since then. Either we just haven't uncovered the evidence of these past impacts or they haven't happened yet. If they haven't happened yet, then we are due for a collision - pure and simple. It doesn't mean it will happen this decade, our lifetime, or even in the next 3 million years. But for all of humanity to proceed as though there were no risk from asteroids would be arrogant.

      Objects with a diameter of roughly 50 m (164 ft) strike Earth approximately once every thousand years, producing explosions comparable to the one known to have detonated roughly 8.5 kilometers (28,000 ft) above Tunguska in 1908. Even when we predict that a near earth asteroid will pass close but not hit us we are not out of danger. In 1490 about 10,000 people died from meteors in the Chinese city of Ch'ing-yang when an asteroid broke overhead.

      But consider this: In 2000 a computer analysis of asteroid impacts showed an annual risk of a fatal impact at one in 90, and concluded that an average of 120,000 people died per event. A small section of my property lies on a 100 year flood plain. Even though there is only 1% chance in any year that the area will flood, and theoretical the area could flood several times within 100 years or not at all in 200 years, insurance companies and mortgage companies won't talk to me about financing and insuring a structure on that area, even though the structure itself will have been paid off in less than 10 years and will likely depreciate to scrap value over the course of several decades. If the odds of flooding on my property are great enough of a concern to scare off finance companies that can diversify their portfolio, then why aren't we more concerned about asteroids that can obliterate the only asset humans can call home? If you lose all your property in a flood but survive, you can declare bankruptcy and start over. Not so easy if you lose a whole metropolitan region and their populations from a single meteor.

      And while we may hate to base our decisions on a computer projection -- especially one done by a newcomer to the field of impact studies -- when it comes to asteroidal impact, there's little else to go on. Only about 3 percent of impacts leave a crater, and even when a crater does form, it is eventually buried by sediment, as happened to the Yucatan crater, or by the shifting of tectonic plates. On Earth, crater-counting can cause a false sense of security.

      Actually, some 100 bodies have already been discovered on orbits which take them so close to the Earth's orbit, that they could hit in the far distant future. This is because the orbits of these bodies change slowly with time. Although their orbits do not intersect Earth's orbit at present, they could hit in a few thousand years or more. I would like to think that it is possible that the level of development our civilization has achieved will continue wi

    7. Re:Misplaced priorities by TWX · · Score: 2

      If you can narrow down a geographical region and a time, you can at least tell people to get away from windows. There were a lot of people hurt in the Russian event because of flying glass. If the meteor is too big then it won't matter a lot, but if it's not huge or if one isn't directly in its path then it may help a few.

      It's similar to nuclear "duck and cover" responses. Obviously, ducking and covering won't help you if you're in the fireball. But, if you're five miles from the fireball, ducking and covering may help you avoid flying debris and being badly hurt or killed by being physically cut up, and you won't need emergency medical services, so less people overwhelm the few remaining medical facilities.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  4. Gogo Canada! by AikonMGB · · Score: 4, Informative

    Also on the PSLV-C20 launch are the Canadian military satellite SAPPHIRE, and the twin spacecraft BRITE-Austria and UniBRITE, developed in Canada for TU Graz and University of Vienna respectively. ISRO put out a pretty good brochure describing the launch.

    You can find some good photos of the stacking and launch vehicle integration here, here, and here. You can watch the launch live on Monday morning here.

    Needless to say, we're all pretty stoked around here ^__^

  5. Re:Oh Canada... by JustOK · · Score: 2

    it's TEA, not thee.

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    rewriting history since 2109
  6. Re:30 Meters? by tp1024 · · Score: 2

    You're underestimating the scaling. The destruction caused by a meteor blowing up in the atmosphere also depends on the altitude. A meteor of twice the size will last longer and blow up much closer to the ground. (Especially when it doesn't strike at such a shallow angle.) Half the distance means four times the pressure (at least for a small area near the "explosion"). At about 100m size it won't break up before hitting the ground ... the only good news is that after this, energy does indeed scale with velocity and mass.

    The Russians got incredibly lucky with that one. A 25m asteroid (or a 20m asteroid at a steep angle) would have caused a ten times stronger blast - that would have destroyed brickwalls instead of just windows.

  7. Living in Canada, I can totally see why... by tandr · · Score: 2

    Because we don't need even more ice falling from the heavens! Even if this is a piece of ice from half-way across the Solar system! /me looking outside and quietly cursing about the weather and the snow and shoveling it again...