Private Efforts Fill Gaps In Earth's Asteroid Defenses

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."

Orbital Debris Quarterly News

[solweil]

Check out Orbital Debris Quarterly News at http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/newsletter/newsletter.html [nasa.gov] They have back issues in pdf

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And which item of which back issue has anything to do with hazardous asteroids?

Re:Orbital Debris Quarterly News

[commodoresloat]

Jesus, man, there's a publication called "Orbital Debris Quarterly News"? That sounds so completely made up. Is there a pull-out centerfold every issue with lurid photos of space rocks? I can't wait to get a copy of this for bathroom reading, keep it right next to "Oatmeal Enthusiast"....

Re:

[117]

The BBC comdey panel show Have I Got News For You has a regular "Missing Words" feature whereby the panel have to guess the missing words from a headline in "this week's guest publication", being always a completely obscure magazine - iirc the most recent one was something like 'Onion Lovers Weekly', and there was also this one [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[DougF]

As for me, I'm going to subscribe immediately and put it right next to my issues of "Obscure Sports Quarterly"...

Still may need Bruce

[tuxgeek]

Keep Bruce Willis near by just in case

Re:

[somersault]

That or a giant spoon. NEO doesn't believe in them so it should be pretty easy to catch him unawares.

Re:

[bluie-]

He's still alive?? I thought he blew himself up saving Earth from a giant asteroid.

Re:

[tuxgeek]

Try as you may, you just can't kill Bruce. He's proved that time and again.

After he saved the day from that last "global killer asteroid" he and Chuck Norris teamed up and kicked the shit out of some killer comets.

It's all in the sequel, watch for it next year.

Gaps? BAH!

[invisibleairwaves]

I thought we still had nukes!?

Re:

[Dekker3D]

hmm, yup. but we're talking about "near-earth objects". i'd assume that means they're near enough to give us a nice radiation shower if we nuked them. eh, i dunno about you but i prefer my own skin colour over that funky glowy green.

Re:

[odourpreventer]

Yes, but there's the matter of getting the nuke near the asteroid in time. While small on a planetary scale, these things can still be freaking big, so a nuclear blast will only nudge it a small fraction of a degree. (We only want to nudge it, disintegration is generally a bad idea.) And if the asteroid nearly misses us, the gravitational forces can still be quite devastating.

Near-Earth, eh?

[XanC]

Seems like anything that's colliding with us would have to be pretty "near", doesn't it?

Re:

[khallow]

While one could detect asteroids by looking for the smoking craters they leave behind, we want to spot them before they get that close. Unfortunately, they aren't that easy to spot when they aren't close.

Re:

[stubob]

By definition, a "near miss."

Leave it to the government to write a requirement like "We don't know how many there are, but count 90% of them."

Poor Mr Gates

[Lotar]

Still looking for a ride home.

Nasa and cash:

[Fluffeh]

Given that they don't seem to be able to afford $3mil to make a game (Link [slashdot.org]) it seems pretty funny in a not really funny sort of way that they don't seem to be able to allot funds to this project either.

Maybe someone is trying to make some money off interest. @_@

Seeing the way things are going today...

[Bananatree3]

I would be surprised if we (United States) ever make it to the Mars/Moon on such a shoestring budget that we have today. Unless we have a dramatic budget shift towards the sciences (and away from wars *cough* *cough*), I see commercial/private interests as our next great funding source for space science and transport. Eventually we will probably have manned moon missions that are completely commercial and privately owned/funded. However NASA's technology right now is lightyears ahead of what any company can do (unless Lockheed Martin and Boeing join the commercial space race). I guess we'll be seeing more philanthropic donations to the space sciences in the future.

Re:Seeing the way things are going today...

[hvm2hvm]

the problem is like in any other country the fact that the people don't know much about how their taxes are spent. i'm not an american but if i would have been i would be pissed to find out that the military gets some 20% while nasa gets less than 1% (there was an article about this on slashdot, can't find it).

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.

Re:Seeing the way things are going today...

[consumer]

the problem is like in any other country the fact that the people don't know much about how their taxes are spent. i'm not an american but if i would have been i would be pissed to find out that the military gets some 20% while nasa gets less than 1%

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.

Re:

[blincoln]

Most Americans think we spend a lot on foreign aid, but it's actually about 1% of the budget

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...

[consumer]

It's a lot of money compared to spending nothing, but as a percentage of the budget it's less than almost any other developed nation spends.

Re:

[hvm2hvm]

yeah, and considering the usa has the largest budget in the world you would think that they would need a smaller percentage for military in order to maintain military superiority. i guess it's never enough...

Re:Seeing the way things are going today...

[kabocox]

I would be surprised if we (United States) ever make it to the Mars/Moon on such a shoestring budget that we have today. Unless we have a dramatic budget shift towards the sciences (and away from wars *cough* *cough*), I see commercial/private interests as our next great funding source for space science and transport. Eventually we will probably have manned moon missions that are completely commercial and privately owned/funded. However NASA's technology right now is lightyears ahead of what any company can do (unless Lockheed Martin and Boeing join the commercial space race). I guess we'll be seeing more philanthropic donations to the space sciences in the future.

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.

Re:

[nasor]

The entire Apollo program cost about $135 billion, adjusted for inflation. The marginal cost of a single Saturn V launch was about $1.2 billion, again after inflation. And today the U.S. spends $1.2 trillion/year on defense. In other words, the U.S. spends 9 times the *total* cost of the Apollo program every single year on defense. If you took just 5% of the military budget and gave it to NASA, that would be enough to launch 50 Satrun V's per year. But hey, I'm sure that 5% means the difference between whet

Re:

[Digestromath]

Except for the disjointed and non congruent voting block that is American /.ers, there isn't a huge effort into lobbying for NASA funds. Alot of funding for NASA and JPL projects is directed into the defense contracts and the military industrial complex.

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)

[B5_geek]

When I was about 12 years old {1985 (+/- 2 years)} I was 'camping' in our back-yard with a friend. As this was during summer vacation were stayed up very late terrorizing the neighborhood pretending we were ninjas or army or whatever.

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

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

This probably an old sprr'krtzz unit from the primary invasion phase. These things can stay in orbit for aeons.

-- Zworgh 54K

Re:

[ppanon]

well, it does seem like the orbital mechanics would be against that happening yes, particularly bouncing twice. If it was rapidly moving in a solar-elliptical orbit and skimmed the Earth, then I could see a single slight bounce at the fringes of the atmosphere. But two bounces would indicate that it was moving slowly enough for significant gravitational interaction with the Earth, which should lead to aerobraking, capture, and collision.

So... drunk pilot?

Re:

[catmistake]

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... that maybe it wasn't 'bouncing off the atmosphere' so much as shaving the edges of a top thin edge of the atmosphere.

Re:

[MichaelSmith]

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... that maybe it wasn't 'bouncing off the atmosphere' so much as shaving the edges of a top thin edge of the atmosphere.

More likely the object broke up as it travelled through the atmosphere. Small particles have more surface area for their mass and produce more light.

Re:

[ppanon]

That would seem more likely to me too. It might just have been in a skimming near-orbit so that atmosphere skipping would have taken it over the horizon where it could break up unseen by the poster. Still, at 100 kilometers altitude and object large enough to appear as large as the original author describes ("It was the size of a grapefruit or softball held out at arms length") would seem to make it big enough to be unlikely to break up unless it was a soft agglomeration of fairly small particles, and you

Re:

[ppanon]

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

Re:

[catmistake]

What leads me to the idea is that even solid smooth surfaces aren't really smooth, or solid. If you look at the atmophere as a whole, yeah it looks pretty smooth and the boundries are defined... but what if you change the scale to one foot? Are you saying the boundries of the atmosphere are smooth then? How about an inch? When I imagine jagged edges at the top of the atmosphere I'm not thinking in the scale of, say, a stadium, but the much smaller scale where 'jagginess' surely must exist, and would be pote

Re:

[ppanon]

What leads me to the idea is that even solid smooth surfaces aren't really smooth

The atmosphere is not a solid, it's a gas (or a liquid depend on your point of view and terminology). 'Nuff said.

It's simple physics. Gases don't support large pressure/density gradients without strong energy gradients to force that to happen. There are very few natural events that would cause two of them to happen side by side. Try filling a bowl and tipping it to see how long you manage to keep dicontinuities in the boundary without putting in a lot of energy. The sun has prominences in its atmosphere du

Re:

[catmistake]

Thank you for obsessively focusing on my obviously poor analogy and completely ignoring any point I was trying to make. If comparing the smoothness of two different things is beyond realistic comprehension for you, well I don't know what. You've basically said, sure, solids aren't really solid or smooth at some other scale, but thats solids, not gasses, which always have smooth surfaces on boundries no matter what the scale." How about we use the surface of the ocean? But that's a boundry between something

Re:

[ppanon]

Ah, I had tried to post a reply to myself but it looks like it didn't get recorded.

Aeroskipping involves using a non uniform body to compress the atmosphere in a precise way, converting forward momentum into a directional pressure front that creates lift. If you come down again after that first skip then you already don't have escape velocity for the gravitational gradient you are in and will just get slowed down further, leading to collision. You seem to accept this and are trying to come up with an alter

Re:

[Deadstick]

If it was rapidly moving in a solar-elliptical orbit and skimmed the Earth, then I could see a single slight bounce at the fringes of the atmosphere

Here's a video of one making a "single slight bounce" in 1972, that was photographed by dozens of people from Salt Lake to Edmonton: http://fireball.meteorite.free.fr/1972_08_11/Video/video_g-t.html [meteorite.free.fr]

Two- and even three-skip meteors are not uncommon, although as you say they normally burn in. The OP does not contradict that, because he lost sight of it at the

Re:

[Bobb9000]

It's funny to read this - I can remember seeing something extremely similar, down to the size, impact craters, and orange color, when I was a kid (though it can't have been the same as yours - this would have been early '90s Florida). I'm not sure I can say I believe you, since I'm really pretty confident I imagined it as I was nearly asleep at the time, but it's funny that the experience was so similar. Makes me wonder...

Re:

[catmistake]

ok, its about time you knew. You're a replicant. You've been living someone else's life, remembering someone else's memories.

Re:

[MichaelSmith]

ok, its about time you knew. You're a replicant. You've been living someone else's life, remembering someone else's memories.

We should ask them each to say something about their mother. Then see which one misses the point.

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[Tony Hoyle]

Just remember to get out of the way when they start shooting...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Known near misses [nasa.gov] are published.

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[KanadaKid19]

When I was about seven (1993ish) I was waiting in our pickup in the parking lot of KFC while my mother picked up dinner. Looking out the window, I saw a an object that looked very similar to the moon in the night sky, but somewhat larger, and with deeper yellow tones. It arced halfway across the horizon in a matter of perhaps 1.5 to 2 seconds, stopped and descended enough to appear 50% larger or so, then flew out of sight, going farther from view and continuing its arc across the horizon in no more than h

Re:

[ppanon]

There's a fair bit of evidence that many experiences of UFOs, alien abductions, etc. can be explained by various sleep disorder variants. Look up web sites and articles on sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming.

Re:

[sortia]

I was in the middle of the desert in Botswana (2002ish) and about 4 of us saw what you just described! It was night time and no other lights viewable so it was very noticable! We were awake, sober and like I said 4 of us all saw it!

Re:

[somersault]

As this was during summer vacation were stayed up very late terrorizing the neighborhood pretending we were ninjas or army or whatever.

Ah, the American dream :) George Bush still likes to play this particular game.

Re:

[Captain Nitpick]

I could see lots of impact craters on it.

It was the size of a grapefruit or softball held out at arms length. We watched it travel through the sky and the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life happened.

It bounced off the atmosphere TWICE and then fell below the horizon. There were no flame-trails that we associate with atmosphere entry.

I have often hoped that some expert would confirm or believe me, but I have been told that I "imagined it" and "that's impossible" buy the few I have told.

I hate to say this, but your story doesn't work. For an asteroid to be at that height and have that visual size, it would have to be several miles across. A rock that big tearing through the upper atmosphere would have been visible to anyone outside, and I'd imagine it would have made NORAD soil its collective pants.

Memory is an inexact thing. So are human senses.

Arecibo Observatory is in need of funding

[prxp]

Any serious private or public effort in funding Earth's defenses against asteroids should pay special attention to the Arecibo Observatory [wikipedia.org]. Besides the fact the observatory is facing serious funding issues (funding was cut to less than half of the regular funding bringing the possibility of actually closing down the facility), Arecibo is one of the best (if not THE best) facilities in the world for tracking asteroids (as a matter of fact the Arecibo Observatory has the biggest, most sensible radio telescope in the world). It is just a shame the effects the war has brought upon ourselves.

Re:

[khallow]

Wait, don't you have a targeting problem with Arecibo? That is, Arecibo has a narrow field of view (since the base reflector is built into a natural valley). So if the asteroid isn't within that field of view, it can't be observed.

Re:Arecibo Observatory is in need of funding

[NeutronCowboy]

Not as bad as it sounds. The primary reflector is stationary, but the primary collector is movable. If you look closely, you'll notice that the Arecibo main dish isn't a perfect parabolic shape. Depending on where the rays are coming from, they're focused in different spots... move the collector, and presto - different part of the sky. No, it isn't quite as flexible as a fully movable one, but it isn't fully stationary either.

Re:

[catmistake]

That's awesome, and it sounds like it can track the hell out of radio sources. But are planet busting asteroids known for being good radio sources?

Re:

[khallow]

Well, the idea is that you try to bounce radio waves off of them, like radar. And you need a lot of dish to pick up the reflected signal. Hence, why something the size of Arecibo is nice.

Re:

[catmistake]

I see. But wouldn't the VLA, or any group of radio telescopes using interferometry be superior to Arecibo?

Re:

[khallow]

They have better resolution. Arecibo has higher gain, that is the area of the dish allows one to detect fainter signals.

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[XNormal]

While optical observatories have excellent angular resolution, they can't measure distances very well. Radar measurements fill in this gap quite nicely.

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[somersault]

Sensible, not smart. All the other radio telescopes like to walk in the rain without appropriate head coverings, while running with scissors.

Re:

[somersault]

Don't ask me how they manage to walk and run at the same time. I'm far too sensible to know that.

Quick question

[pembo13]

How much coverage is there around our little sphere in terms of looking out and observing into space? ie. how much of the earth is currently blind due to lack of equipment?

Re:

[timmarhy]

you do realise the earth turns, right?

Re:

[somersault]

It turns sure, but that doesn't mean that if you stand in the same place for a year you'll see all of the stars that are possible to see from earth. Viewing the sky from the southern hemisphere, you see completely different stars (at least this is what I have gleaned from watching TV :P ). 3 directable 'scopes would presumably be enough.. one towards the north, one around the equator, one towards the south? Or am I oversimplifying? IANANASAE.

Re:

[pembo13]

Yes... it turns on an axis however.

Astreroid "Defenses"

[Kenz0r]

A term like asteroid defense, to me, always brings up the image of a battery of laser cannons or special nuclear silo's that actually -defend- us against asteroids. Wouldn't it be more appropriatly dull to call this asteroid observation?

Re:Astreroid "Defenses"

[somersault]

I think it would be more appropriate to call it Missile Command

Re:

[evanbd]

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

Re:

[glwtta]

always brings up the image of a battery of laser cannons or special nuclear silo's

Whereas I always get the image of Bruce Willis in a two and a half hour beer commercial.

... god that movie sucked.

Re:

[iso-cop]

Given the recent conversation on NASA Watch http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/04/stupid_movie_al.html [nasawatch.com] about the 57+ trillion nuclear warheads (each with 100 megatons of explosive power) needed to nudge the moon toward the earth, I wonder just we would do.

"Private efforts"?

[iminplaya]

Gov't: Well, what'll we do?
Private observers: It's very simple. We just need 240 dollars...

What happened to the base ?

[Eth1csGrad1ent]

Damn it! I thought we had a secret base on the dark side of the moon to handle THIS VERY THING !?!?!?
You mean we don't ? Seriously ?? Have we actually confirmed that ??

Thats the problem with secrets and myths these days...half of them turn out to be bogus...and the other half are SO secret that literally NOONE knows about them any more.

If everyone who knows we have a secret base on the dark side of the moon is dead..then its kinda useless as a defense mechanism isnt it !

For godsakes people! Its a catch-2

Missing information from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Gates only contributed the money to LSST so they would run vista on it

Re:

[muzicman]

Then were all screwed regardless!!

140 meters

[Plutonite]

There must be a reason behind that number, any clue anyone? What was that.. RTFA? Pffffft. You're disgusting.

Private asteroid security

[S3D]

Nice city you have here. What a pity, 99942 Apophis going to wipe it out in decade. However for couple of billion we can change its course a little. What ? According to your date you are safe ? Believe me it's going to hit you. We have just installed propulsion system on it's surface.

Fate

[Haoie]

I'm of the thought that it doesn't really matter what sort of 'defenses' humanity sets up.

If a killer asteroid is headed our way, may as well accept fate.

Re:

[timmarhy]

you'd change your tune if there really was one.

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.

Re:

[somersault]

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.

We could install a massive sign in front of the sun saying "Free guns and beer!!"?

Re:

[icebrain]

Then you move on to plan B, which is "get as many people off the planet as possible." Something we should be thinking about and working towards, even though it may take hundreds of years.

The airplane would have never been built if the Wright brothers (and everyone else) had kept waiting for 747s instead.

Current space technology is about at the same development level (compared to something like a practical interplanetary shuttle) as the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloons are to the A380 or 787. Sitting

Re:

[icebrain]

If that's how you feel about it, you can go ahead and plan to off yourself the day it's supposed to hit. The vast majority of the rest of us have taken a bit of a liking to this whole "living and breathing" thing; we'd like to keep doing it. By your logic, we shouldn't have severe weather warnings, hurricane tracking, earthquake and tsunami warning, etc. because those things are our "fate" too.

I really think there should be some kind of conspiracy (how to pull it off, I don't know) to make the general pub

Well, There's Your Problem Right There...

[BlueStrat]

From TFA: "...NASA has yet to allot funds to the project.

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

[ThreeGigs]

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

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I doubt that an orbiting platform would be nessasary. Ground based systems would be just as

Re:

[evanbd]

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

Why space would still be useful

[Herve5]

From studies in the European Space Agency a couple of years ago, I understood having a spacecraft (and a telescope) located closer to the Sun, in the inner solar system, would allow you to much better see the asteroids, because they are much better lit by the sun when seen from there. There have been very serious papers on this kind of topic, even plans for dedicated missions and spacecrafts, also passenger payloads on already planned spacecrafts (solar observers typically) but the ESA budget probably looks

Re:

[Herve5]

a reference I found too late for the previous post, that leads to others --the ESA study EUNEOS: http://spaceguard.esa.int/tumblingstone/issues/num19/eng/euneos.htm [esa.int]

Re:

[The Queen]

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.

Well, sure, except for the latest and greatest and really this one's true this time theory that the world is going to end in 2012...due to, according to some, a big fat asteroid slamming into the planet. So NASA is holding off getting started until 2009/2010, so that they can save the day at the last second in true Hollywood style, thereby proving their

Re:

[ThreeGigs]

Notice I said a *pair* of telescopes. And look at my numbers and you'll see they only make sense for one telescope. Meaning I assumed most readers would catch on to the fact that one telescope would be aimed 'behind' the other, such that it covers the area of space previously covered anywhere from 1 to 7 days before, depending on what's deemed most effective. That gives you initial results within a week.

Continued tracking is simply continued observation, if needed. I'm sure that 99.9% of the objects detecte

NEOs?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Meteors Or Rocks Presently Headed Earthwards Unless Stopped (MORPHEUS)?

Re:

[towelie-ban]

There is no meteor. Then you'll see, that it is not the meteor that ends existence, it is only yourself.

oh shit..

[biscon]

there's a NEO in LEO!!!

Private efforts eh ?

[bytesex]

This fine asteroid explosion was offered to you by Unilever for the viewing pleasure and the security of you and your children. Because at Unilever, we know what it feels like when you can't by our washing up liquid anymore. Or something.

"[NASA] yet to allot funds"? Bullshit

[cmholm]

In 2005, Congress Directed NASA to go do the work. No, they didn't just sit on the money. As a part of this work, Congress sent a few million to the Air Force to manage the University of Hawaii's NEO detector project, PanSTARRS [wikipedia.org].

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.

Gaps

[Spatial]

Private Efforts Fill Gaps In Earth's Asteroid Defenses

That's a funny way to phrase it. There are gaps in Earth's asteroid defences, yes, a bit like how there are gaps in the total surface area of the planet where there are no roads.

Nukes???

[kellyb9]

Why don't we start shooting nukes into space? No seriously hear me out on this. First, we may accidently divert a near earth object. and second, if aliens come around to suck out our atmosphere, they may just pass right on through to the next planet (They don't want none of this.)

Only a politician...

[Muad'Dave]

...would task an agency to catalog 90% of something that no one knows the total number of. I can see it now:

Politician: We want you to catalog 90% of asteroids by 2020.
Scientist: But sir, we don't know how many asteroids there are!
Politician: Exactly!

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!".

Re:

[Danny Rathjens]

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

-- Charles Babbage

Private Asteroid Defenses?

[Discoflamingo13]

Cue joke about defending Earth from asteroids by batting them away with the invisible hand of the free market in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

I'm curious about a few things

[MrKaos]

How much mass could we orbit around one of these things right now?

I mean if we get enough mass to orbit an object for long enough won't it have an effect on it's trajectory (vector/velocity)? Say for example the recently discussed [slashdot.org] Apophis mass, it's due to fly by 2029 and potentially hit in 2036, wouldn't it at least make sense to get up close and personal with an object of that size that's potentially going to drop in for a visit.

This is something business could do couldn't it?

Pay for hits

[Tablizer]

Why doesn't the government simply pay for finds? Private industry is usually more effective than government when its easy to measure "success". Finding asteroids is almost the perfect case of such a situation. The bigger the roid, the more the cash.

Although, I suppose there may be some ambiguity with regard to the known size. But an estimate may be good enough. Perhaps if it turns out to be significantly larger than expected after the first payment, then additional cash can be given. But, the other way aro

NASA Funding

[DynaSoar]

> The bottom line is that government is moving slowly on cataloging NEOs

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.

"Defenses"

[DynaSoar]

Oops, should have included this in my previous post.

> Private Efforts Fill Gaps In Earth's Asteroid Defenses [article title]

There are no "defenses". There is no program anywhere to protect Earth from a strike. There are government funded and private programs performing studies as to how it might be done, but that's all. The article is about search and/or cataloging projects, not defense projects.