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Private Efforts Fill Gaps In Earth's Asteroid Defenses
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Apr 22, 2008 12:53 AM
from the tunguska-was-a-warning-shot dept.
from the tunguska-was-a-warning-shot dept.
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."
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Orbital Debris Quarterly News (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Orbital Debris Quarterly News (Score:5, Funny)
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Still may need Bruce (Score:5, Funny)
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Near-Earth, eh? (Score:2)
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Nasa and cash: (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe someone is trying to make some money off interest. @_@
Seeing the way things are going today... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Seeing the way things are going today... (Score:4, Insightful)
i'm not flaming the americans for being ignorant or something because this happens everywhere, including in my country. democracy is just another way of forcing something on the people but a lot more effective because it's done in the name of freedom and it gives you the impression that you matter and that what you want will someday, somehow be done.
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Re:Seeing the way things are going today... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many examples like that. Most Americans think we spend a lot on foreign aid, but it's actually about 1% of the budget, i.e. 20 times less than we spend on the military. And that vastly underestimates how much we spend on the military because they now shift the money around to hide many of the expenses in areas outside the Pentagon, like the State Department.
The worst part is, you know that war in Iraq? The one that we're spending billions of dollars on? That's not part of the budget at all. That's all paid for by borrowing. Yes, the Iraq war is going on a credit card. We are so screwed.
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1% of the budget is what got the US to the moon. It may be a small percentage of the budget, but it's certainly still "a lot" of money.
Re:Seeing the way things are going today... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Seeing the way things are going today... (Score:4, Insightful)
The US isn't noted for long term thinking. China is. The US has to have some one else be there doing it to out do before we take a governmental interest.
US companies do have all of NASAs space tech. The problem is that its far too expensive for a business to play around without seeing any short term ROI. Some Japanese businesses have been noted for having long business planning that could make commercial space stuff profitable, but you'd have to have atleast one company/government/person fund their own profitable space stuff before anyone else thinks me too.
Right now, it takes Bill Gates level cash for an individual to play funding a space company/assets. Sure we have a lot of billionaires now, but if was cheap enough that individuals that have less than ten million could get into space, you'd see vastly more development. (It's not there, yet.) When the price drops to where those of us making 30-40K can buy a vacation home or something in space, then you'd see massive space development. It's all about cost.
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There just isn't anyone lobbying for NEO observation because there must isn't any money in it. You congressman or senator isn't gonna bust his ass to spread a little pork barrel spending to a few astronomers.
To compare the American government spends a
Slightly offtopic (But about a NEO) (Score:2, Offtopic)
It was full night, the moon was out and it was cloudless. My friend saw it first and pointed it to me. There was a large asteroid or meteor in the sky and it was bright orange in colour (as if an orange-coloured spotlight was trained on it) I have since learnt that this item
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So... drunk pilot?
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Well... I bet the edge of the atmosphere isn't a solid smooth shell, that if an object were passing at a particular angle, it might hit more than one jagged edge
Presumably your "particular angle" is a grazing tangent.
But what would lead you to make that bet? The atmosphere's a fairly layered mixture of uniformly mixed gases. Surface gradients would tend to even out pretty quickly. You might get some light density waves but I doubt their height differential would be that great. The atmosphere does expand and contract locally and globally depending on a number of factors: things that affect temperature and therefore density, like seasons or solar activity. But gener
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Arecibo Observatory is in need of funding (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Arecibo Observatory is in need of funding (Score:5, Informative)
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Quick question (Score:2)
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Astreroid "Defenses" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Astreroid "Defenses" (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, the actual intervention would be more likely to involve painting the asteroid white (with a few years warning solar radiation pressure is enough to change the course) than lobbing a nuke at it, assuming we find it in time. So the "defense system" itself wouldn't be special purpose, it would just be another launch vehicle carrying a probe that could perform a rendezvous.
This is more like the target acquisition half of the defense system -- sure, it's not complete, but "observation" to me implies tha
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Whereas I always get the image of Bruce Willis in a two and a half hour beer commercial.
Missing information from TFA (Score:2, Funny)
140 meters (Score:2)
Private asteroid security (Score:5, Funny)
Fate (Score:2, Insightful)
If a killer asteroid is headed our way, may as well accept fate.
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the likelyhood that we are going to be destroied by an NEO though? come on people this isn't the movies. not only that but what do you think we could do if there was one? if something the size of texas like in the movies was going to hit us, you have NO CHANCE of significantly altering it's course.
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Well, There's Your Problem Right There... (Score:2)
There's your problem right there. You've got bureaucrats in charge. Bureaucrats think differently about project funds. Their thought process runs something like:
"I'm a big muckety-muck because I'm in charge of this huge project allotment fund. Now, if I just went around willy-nilly *allotting it*, I wouldn't have this big fund to allot and be a big muckety-muck, now would I?".
I wonder how much he'll think being a big muckety-muck was worth as he's wat
Timing is everything (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Except that you wouldn't find all of them in that survey. They're only easy to spot when they're nearby; for the dangerous ones, in orbits similar to Earth's, that only happens every few years. For the rest, you'd have to hope that it happened to be close by when you were surveying the right piece of sky. You also have to get several images of an asteroid to start computing even an approximate trajectory -- 3 images is a minimum, but that would give awful error bars. Sure, you can go follow up on ever
NEOs? (Score:5, Funny)
Private efforts eh ? (Score:2)
"[NASA] yet to allot funds"? Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
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 [ps1sc.org] 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.
Only a politician... (Score:5, Interesting)
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!".
NASA Funding (Score:4, Insightful)
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/ [nasa.gov] ). 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.
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