England Forms Asteroid Watch Committee

~spot writes "According to CNN (and the BBC), England has founded an asteroid & comet collision task force to watch for potential planet killers, known as ELE (extinction level events). " Neither Bruce Willis nor Tia Leoni has been asked to join. Steve Buscemi will be a consultant.

You've gotta look...

[Royster]

...if you're ever going to find it before it hits.

My only fear is that this is that this is England's best chance to recover from the embarassment that was Moonraker.

Amusement,

[fosh]

Tne thing that I find really amusing, and quite synical (I do live in NYC) is that we have NO way of preventing a cosmic rock from hitting us if it is headed towards earth. Becuase of this slight detail, isn't forming a Cosmic Rock Watching comitee purely aimed at media hype/Mass Hesteria?? I can just see it now, it'll be like the Y2K Fiasco, a reported on the news will anounce one day that we are all going to die jan 1, 2999...

(Sound Familiar???)

Good science prevents hype...

[nordman]

Provided the data analysis is held under close scrutiny, and up to the usual peer-review process, I think this sort of story is exciting. The more science (real, working, no flam artist) is presented to the public as part of their everyday life, the more likely it will be that the general public will be able to make informed decisions on how they want their tax dollars spent. That's a Good Thing(TM).

Better to know, or not?

[jamiemccarthy]

Carl Sagan opposed research to find near-earth asteroids, on the grounds that finding them was statistically more dangerous than not.

The argument is that earth-grazers are orders of magnitude more common than earth-colliders; and that, in the near future, terrorists will have the capability to launch devices to intercept grazers and change their course.

If there will be 1,000 terrorist opportunities before the first rock actually hits us, then ignorance is safer than knowledge - unless we have reason to believe that the Mean Time Between Terrorists Taking Advantage Of Earth-Grazing Rocks (MTBTTAOEGR) is less than 1,000. In short, we have to assume that random chance is less dangerous than the crazy human beings who live on our planet. That's a questionable argument at best.

He's got a point. But, by the time your average terrorist has the capability to put a rocket on an asteroid (twenty years?) it may not matter. By that time, sky imaging may be so cheap that the bad guys can find grazers without the good guys' help. A difficult question in any case.

Jamie McCarthy

What this planet needs...

[Zach Baker]

Is a few more "close" calls before humanity gets cracking on something like this. But imagine the possibilities if astronomers get something like SETI@Home going to process the results of such a survey. Hmm... discover humanity-extinguishing asteroid... establish contact with extraterrestrials... can't... decide...!! Suddenly, cracking cryptographic keys looks kind of insignificant. =^)

Yes, we _can_ prevent hit given N years notice

[StupendousMan]

If we discover that some asteroid may hit the earth after some reasonably long time interval -- say, 5 to 15 years -- then there is indeed something we can to do prevent it; or, at least, try to prevent it. We could launch a rocket armed with nuclear bomb(s) to intercept the asteroid when it is still far, far, far away. Exploding the bomb(s) near the asteroid will alter its orbit by some small amount ... but if the asteroid is far enough away, that small amount may prevent the collision.

There have been many studies of the technical feasibility of this idea. A good place to start is
http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]