[meteorite-list] Hunt for Potentially Deadly Asteroids Underfunded, Panel Says

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:00:06 2004
Message-ID: <200207111536.IAA00819_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_panel_020710.html

Hunt for Potentially Deadly Asteroids Underfunded, Panel Says
By Jason Bates
space.com
July 10, 2002

WASHINGTON D.C. - The U.S. government should invest more money in tracking
near-Earth objects that might threaten Earth, said members of a space
roundtable on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

While the Air Force is not tasked with tracking near-Earth objects, U.S. Air
Force Brig. Gen. S. Pete Worden said such a mission would be appropriate for
the service and an assignment could occur "in the next few years," he said.

A warning center could be run by the Air Force and coordinate with
non-military groups that currently track objects, Worden said during the
roundtable, which was titled "The Asteroid Threat: Identification and
Mitigation Strategies" and sponsored by an organization called ProSpace.

Worden, deputy director of operations for U.S. Space Command, Peterson Air
Force Base, Colo., was not attending the panel as an official representative
of the U.S. Department of Defense. He has in the past spoken often about the
need to widen the search for potentially threatening asteroids.

Currently, NASA spends about $4 million per year on programs that track
space objects larger than a kilometer in diameter (0.62 miles), said Colleen
Hartman, director of NASA's Solar System Exploration Division.

NASA, however, does not track objects the size of the recently discovered
2002 MN2, an object between 50-100 meters in diameter (roughly 50-100 yards)
that passed within 75,000 miles of Earth in June, the panelists said. The
rock was found three days after it flew by. Increased funding should be used
to track these smaller objects as well, the panelists said. Some vocal
advocates of increased asteroid monitoring around the globe have long called
for similar changes, whether funded by NASA or some other agency or
institution.

If the U.S. government were to take a more active role in tracking all space
objects, the Air Force could be responsible for tracking and cataloguing,
while NASA could be responsible for scientific investigation, Worden said.

Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.), chairman of the space and aeronautics
subcommittee of the House Science Committee, said the potential danger to
Earth from space objects is greater than that posed by global warming. He
suggested that some of the money spent on global warming research could be
used to fund more work on tracking space objects.

Such funding could be used to first locate and track asteroids and comets,
and later to find ways to defend Earth against the threats and eventually to
use the space objects for the benefits of the Earth's population, Rohrbacher
said.

Other researchers in the past have suggested mining asteroids for valuable
metals and minerals as one way to make them useful to humanity. Some have
even suggested setting up small colonies on larger asteroids.
Received on Thu 11 Jul 2002 11:36:05 AM PDT