Transterrestrial Musings  


Amazon Honor System Click Here to Pay

Space
Alan Boyle (MSNBC)
Space Politics (Jeff Foust)
Space Transport News (Clark Lindsey)
NASA Watch
NASA Space Flight
Hobby Space
A Voyage To Arcturus (Jay Manifold)
Dispatches From The Final Frontier (Michael Belfiore)
Personal Spaceflight (Jeff Foust)
Mars Blog
The Flame Trench (Florida Today)
Space Cynic
Rocket Forge (Michael Mealing)
COTS Watch (Michael Mealing)
Curmudgeon's Corner (Mark Whittington)
Selenian Boondocks
Tales of the Heliosphere
Out Of The Cradle
Space For Commerce (Brian Dunbar)
True Anomaly
Kevin Parkin
The Speculist (Phil Bowermaster)
Spacecraft (Chris Hall)
Space Pragmatism (Dan Schrimpsher)
Eternal Golden Braid (Fred Kiesche)
Carried Away (Dan Schmelzer)
Laughing Wolf (C. Blake Powers)
Chair Force Engineer (Air Force Procurement)
Spacearium
Saturn Follies
JesusPhreaks (Scott Bell)
Journoblogs
The Ombudsgod
Cut On The Bias (Susanna Cornett)
Joanne Jacobs


Site designed by


Powered by
Movable Type
Biting Commentary about Infinity, and Beyond!

« Planet Busters | Main | Safe Enough? »

Defending The Planet

Leonard David continues to report from this week's planetary defense conference in Garden Grove, CA.

The consensus? We need to get more serious about this threat.

NASA now supports -- in collaboration with the United States Air Force -- the Spaceguard Survey and its goal of discovering and tracking 90 percent of the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with a diameter greater than about one-half mile (1 kilometer) by 2008. If one of these big bruisers were to strike our planet, it would spark catastrophic global effects that would include severe regional devastation and global climate change.

By charting the whereabouts of these celestial objects, it is anticipated that decades of warning time is likely if one of the large-sized space boulders was found to be on a heading that intersects Earth.

But a uniform message from the experts attending this week’s planetary defense gathering is extending the survey to spot smaller objects, down to some 500 feet (150 meters) in diameter. These asteroids can wreak havoc too, but on a more localized scale.

For instance, if one of these smaller asteroids were to strike along the California coast, millions of people might be killed, Morrison said. A little further to the east, he added, "a nice crater out in the desert" would become a tourist attraction...

...Developing a viable mitigation campaign, Yeomans explained, demands three prerequisites: "You need to find them early. You need to find them early. And we need to find them early."

This needs to be more closely coordinated with the president's new space policy, both programmatically and politically.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 25, 2004 11:49 AM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.transterrestrial.com/mt-diagnostics.cgi/2137

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference this post from Transterrestrial Musings.
A Serious Planetary Threat
Excerpt: A few weeks ago, Earth had what can only be called a "near miss" in astronomical terms with what looked like an object that could...
Weblog: Dean's World
Tracked: February 29, 2004 05:56 AM
Comments

...and there off... looking for tie-ins to the new space policy.

Posted by ken anthony at February 25, 2004 12:16 PM

oops... they're.

Posted by at February 25, 2004 12:17 PM

A little further to the east, he added, "a nice crater out in the desert" would become a tourist attraction...

Better not tell all those nice people in Phoenix.

Posted by billg at February 25, 2004 03:32 PM

So why isn't the conference held in Flagstaff? With field trips, of course.

Posted by Dan DeLong at February 25, 2004 04:49 PM

Has anyone seen any analysis of the approximate physical separation required for one of two Earth-derived life settlements to survive a direct gamma-ray burst hit?

Posted by Dave K. Smith at February 26, 2004 04:15 PM

Tunguska should be all the evidence needed for more work on this. While the subject isn't being completely ignored, I wonder what the reaction would be if it was "nuculer"? Just imagine someone saying this:

"Folks, we expect a nuclear bomb to blow somewhere on earth every 100-200 years. We can't say where. It could happen tomorrow. Here's a picture where the last one blew down a forest, and it was a SMALL one. We have some ideas about how we could stop another one, but we aren't even looking very hard."

We've got a pretty good chance that it won't happen until advancing capability makes it a moot point, but ...

Posted by VR at February 26, 2004 05:05 PM

Oh. Rand, the "continues to report" link doesn't seem to work currently.

Posted by VR at February 26, 2004 05:18 PM

It's fixed now. Funny, you're the first person to complain--I guess none of the other commenters followed the link. ;-)

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 26, 2004 05:35 PM

Being the first to comment - I did get to that link.
Puzzling?

Posted by ken anthony at February 27, 2004 09:44 AM


Post a comment
Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments: