NASA is supposed to seek out almost all the asteroids that threaten Earth, but lacks the money to do the job, a federal report found.
That is because even though Congress assigned the space agency the mission four years ago, it never gave NASA the money to build the necessary telescopes, said the report, released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences.
Specifically, NASA has been ordered to spot 90 percent of potentially deadly rocks hurtling through space by 2020.
Even without the money, NASA said it has completed about one-third of its assignment with its current telescope system.
The agency estimated that about 20,000 asteroids and comets in Earth’s solar system bigger than 140m in diameter are potential threats to the planet. That is slightly smaller than the Superdome sports arena in New Orleans, Louisiana. So far, scientists know where about 6,000 of the objects are.
Rocks between 140m and 1,000m in diameter can devastate an entire region, but not the entire globe, said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s manager of the near-Earth objects program. Objects bigger than that are even more threatening, of course.
Just last month, astronomers were surprised when an object of unknown size and origin bashed into Jupiter and created an Earth-sized bruise that still is spreading. Jupiter gets slammed more often than Earth because of its immense gravity, enormous size and location.
Disaster movies like Armageddon and near misses in previous years frightened people and alerted them to a serious issue. But when it comes to doing something about monitoring the threat, the academy concluded: “There has been relatively little effort by the US government.”
And the US government is practically the only government doing anything at all, the report found.
“It shows we have a problem we’re not addressing,” said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, an advocacy group.
NASA calculated that to spot the asteroids as required by law would cost about US$800 million between now and 2020, either with a new ground-based telescope or a space observation system, Johnson said. If NASA received only US$300 million, it could find most asteroids bigger than 305m across, he said.
But so far NASA has gotten neither.
It may never get the money, said John Logsdon, a space policy professor at George Washington University.
There is not a big enough group pushing for the money, he said.
At the moment, NASA has identified about five near-Earth objects that pose better than a one-in-a-million risk of hitting the planet and being big enough to cause serious damage, Johnson said. That number changes from time to time, usually with new asteroids added and old ones removed as more information is gathered on their orbits.
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