Still, as with many global issues, little will be accomplished unless the United States takes the lead. #Finetune odds asteroid hitting seriesAlong these lines, the Association of Space Explorers, a group of more than 300 people from 30 nations who have flown in space (of which I am a member), is beginning a series of meetings in cooperation with the United Nations to work out the outlines of such an agreement. The best course is international coordination on deflection technology, along with global agreements on what should be done if a collision looks likely. In the end, of course, this is not just America’s problem, as an asteroid strike would be felt around the globe. Second, the laws of probability say we would be struck by such a large asteroid only once every 200,000 years - that’s a long time to keep a standing arsenal of nuclear asteroid-blasters, and raises all sorts of possibilities of accidents or sabotage - the old “cure being worse than the disease” phenomenon. Why the concern? First, even with good intentions, launching a nuclear-armed missile would violate the international agreements by which all weaponry is banned from space. #Finetune odds asteroid hitting driverBut for the overwhelming majority of potential deflection cases, using a nuclear warhead would be like a golfer swinging away with his driver to sink a three-foot putt the bigger bang is not always better. It is possible that in some cases - such as an asteroid greater than a third of a mile across - the nuclear option might be necessary. But for some reason NASA seems to have opted for a federal form of civil disobedience.Īnother problem with the report was that, while it outlined other possibilities, it estimated that using a nuclear-armed missile to divert an asteroid would be “10 to 100 times more effective” than non-nuclear approaches. It was a left-handed way for the Congress to say to NASA that this is our priority. But in this case, Congress not only directed NASA to provide it with a recommended program but also asked for the estimated budget to support it. Why did the space agency drop the ball? Like all government departments, it fears the dreaded “unfunded mandate” Congress has the habit of directing agencies to do something and then declining to give them the money to do so. An object that size could devastate a small country and would probably destroy civilization. In 1998, Congress gave NASA’s Spaceguard Survey program a mandate of “discovering, tracking, cataloging and characterizing” 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than one kilometer (3,200 feet) wide by 2008. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t seem to have any clear plan to put this expertise into action. On the promising side, scientists have a good grasp of the risks of a cosmic fender-bender, and have several ideas that could potentially stave off disaster. Last week two events in Washington - a conference on “planetary defense” held by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the release by NASA of a report titled “Near-Earth Object Survey and Deflection Analysis of Alternatives” - gave us good news and bad on this front. What few probably realize is that there are thousands of other space objects that could hit us in the next century that could cause severe damage, if not total destruction. AMERICANS who read the papers or watch Jay Leno have been aware for some time now that there is a slim but real possibility - about 1 in 45,000 - that an 850-foot-long asteroid called Apophis could strike Earth with catastrophic consequences on April 13, 2036.
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