It’s nice to see that NASA is taking the asteroid threat more seriously, but we’re still not doing enough to actually prevent them from hitting us. In fact, we’re doing almost nothing.
9 thoughts on “Intruder Alert”
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It’s nice to see that NASA is taking the asteroid threat more seriously, but we’re still not doing enough to actually prevent them from hitting us. In fact, we’re doing almost nothing.
Comments are closed.
Thank you for reminding me of the video game, Bezerk. Beware of evil Otto.
With current detecting technology, anything deployed to deal with an asteroid would have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
I would like to note that I have a fantastic idea for asteroid detection. It may detect asteroids using simple, off the shelf tools. I have never built a prototype, however. Filing a patent is too expensive for me.
This data will probably give us a much better statistical picture of the shooting gallery we fly through every day.
Great. So if the worst were to happen we (or at least parts of the Government) will know about it…and we won’t be able to do anything.
I think I saw that movie…
NASA/USA isn’t doing anything. Is anyone else? Chinese, Russians?
NASA is doing a credible job cataloging asteroids. All of the possible Earth killer asteroids have been found. There definitely won’t be a cretaceous level event in the next few hundred years.
New instruments will help detect more of the smaller bodies. These are potentially dangerous, but only to a relatively small area of impact (these would be city killers). Multiply that by the long odds (roughly one per century) across all the land and sea area of the Earth, and it very, very unlikely to harm to humans.
It is worth it to keep looking, it would be possible to mitigate a collision of a city killer if we knew it was coming.
Good information available in podcast for here: http://www.bigpicturescience.org/episodes/asteroids
I can say with 100% certainty that not all of the Earth killer asteroids have been found. Just wait.
Wodun: You are playing clever word games here. Orbits are chaotic, so there’s likely to be future Earth killers. But we can observe and predict all the large objects in the inner solar system right now with sufficient precision to say there aren’t any Earth killer NEOs in the next century.
But you knew that already.
Would be nice to have this around though:
http://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/projects/directed-energy-planetary-defense