Some great pictures from space, which is the best place from which to see them.
But we still don’t seem to be taking the problem seriously:
NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn’t have the money to do the job, a federal report says.
That’s because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave NASA money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says.
Because space isn’t important. Even when it is.
Shielding Earth from asteroid collisions is important, but I don’t understand why anyone would consider it urgent. As far as we know, this is a pretty rare occurrence at this point in solar system history, and if we can wait another hundred years (when I assume we’ll be spacefaring routinely) we’ll have the capability at much lower expense than it would take to try to develop it now. Is my thinking on this naive?
As far as we know, this is a pretty rare occurrence at this point in solar system history, and if we can wait another hundred years (when I assume we’ll be spacefaring routinely) we’ll have the capability at much lower expense than it would take to try to develop it now.
We are hit every day — the frequency goes inversely as the size. Tonguska was only a hundred years ago, and it would have killed millions if it had hit a metropolitan area. We have the technology today, and it’s affordable. We simply choose to spend the money on other things.
Rand, you might have forgotten that there was a Tunguska-scale event in Brazil in 1930 and a probably smaller, but still substantial, event in northern Norway in 2006. So far in well-recorded history, we’ve been lucky. Luck doesn’t last for ever.
But isn’t the human footprint on Earth still small enough that most Tonguska-scale rocks will miss us? And considering that launch is still pricey, and that we’d have to reliably identify the risk, acquire target, launch, and intercept it, in what? A few days? A couple weeks?, wouldn’t this be hugely expensive?
This seems almost like cap-and-trade, an incredible expense to address a danger of doubtful likelihood. Has anyone analyzed cost vs. benefit of insuring against metropolitan destruction from falling asteroids, and compared it with other expensive risk-avoidance projects?
Mark, city-busters aren’t the point really – although they are relatively common (three per century?).
The space infrastructure needed to be easily able to deal with this sort of threat has other, very well-documented benefits; such capability will more than pay for itself.
However, the really important risk is a much larger-scale, but less likely, one – one that is worth just about any expense to avoid, for if this particular chance comes up it’s all over. Tunguska-scale events are not the really important risk. Chixculub-scale ones are.