The Underfunded, Disorganized Plan To Save Earth From the Next Giant Asteroid

New submitter citadrianne sends a story about the beginnings of our asteroid defense efforts, and how initial concern over an asteroid strike wasn't sustained long enough to establish consistent funding: Until a few decades ago, the powers that be didn't take the threat of asteroids very seriously. This changed on March 23, 1989, when an asteroid 300 meters in diameter called 1989FC passed within half a million miles of Earth. As the New York Times put it, "In cosmic terms, it was a close call." After this arguably close brush with total annihilation, Congress asked NASA to prepare a report on the threat posed by asteroids. The 1992 document, "The Spaceguard Survey: Report of the NASA International Near-Earth-Object Detection Workshop," was, suffice it to say, rather bleak.

If a large NEO were to hit Earth, the report said, its denizens could look forward to acid rain, firestorms, and an impact winter induced by dust being thrown miles into the stratosphere. ... After reports from the National Research Council made it clear that meeting the discovery requirement outlined in the Congressional mandate was impossible given the lack of program funding, NEOO got a tenfold budget increase from 2009 to 2014. Yet it still faces a number of difficulties. A program audit released last September described the NEOO program as a one-man operation that is poorly integrated and lacking in objectives and oversight.

Comments

Armageddon

[Raannndy]

Is that one man Bruce Willis? I think we're safe if it is.

What plan?

[CrimsonAvenger]

A plan to save us from NEOs would require some ability to actually reach an NEO before it hit.

Since we're not working to develop that capability, pretty much anything else we do is irrelevant....

Re:What plan?

[NotDrWho]

No worries, SpaceX will get us there!

[whispering from off camera]....okay.....wait, WHAT happened?......No I didn't even turn on the news this weekend.....

Okay, a minor revision to that....

Re:What plan?

[arth1]

A plan to save us from NEOs would require some ability to actually reach an NEO before it hit.

Not necessarily. We could find a way to jump some of us aside, or heat up one side of it with lasers from afar, or burrow until the crisis is over, or have congress declare it a non-problem, or have religious people pray for a miracle.

I think the simplest solution is the better one. Let them hit. Evolution will take care of the aftermath. It already has weeded out large landbound reptiles that can't take the heat (or the cold) due to meteor strikes. If the Yucatan big boy hadn't hit, there might have been scaly beings in charge now. Other than lawyers, I mean.

Re:What plan?

[drinkypoo]

A plan to save us from NEOs would require some ability to actually reach an NEO before it hit.

Except the "giant lasers" plan. That just requires us to make much bigger lasers, and probably also bigger sharks.

Re:What plan?

[Rei]

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

More to the point

[rnws]

Given that these sorts of events have consequences on a planetary scale and that little things like nation-states mean absolutely nothing if we lose the species, why the hell isn't this an international effort? Why does the USA have to do all the grunt-work? (I'm not a yank BTW). This really is something I could get behind the UN for actually doing something useful lately. (The UN has done SFA of use since eradicating smallpox).

Re:Gov program performs audit to ask for more mone

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> *One-man* government program writes his own audit to ask for more money.

You laugh, but in ten years, if this went through as a US Government program I'd fully expect to see:

* Undersecretary of NEO Defense
* 2 Directors of NEO Defense (Homeland and Foreign)
* 5 staff assistants for Undersecretary and Directors
* 5 NEO Program Managers and a $20M technology budget
* 2 NEO Project Managers to handle the implementation (and expected missed deadlines)
* Full salaries, benefits and pensions for everyone, plus the original guy who has now retired
* ...and still only one man actually doing any work.

Re:Gov program performs audit to ask for more mone

[Pikoro]

You laugh at that, but with private corporations, sometimes things aren't much better. At one point in time, for about 4 months, I was the only person managing all the systems for around 250 branch banking offices in Japan for Citigroup. 1 person. This included the servers, diskless clients, and printers for them all. Across 3 data centers for load balancing and redundancy, so, counting spares, nearly 1000 servers. Stress level was increased until I quit.