[meteorite-list] United Nations Urged to Adopt Asteroid Impact Treaty

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:14:24 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <200702262214.OAA03936_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/17/un_asteroid_treaty/

UN urged to adopt asteroid impact treaty
Failing to prepare is preparing to die
By Chris Williams
The Register (United Kingdom)
February 17, 2007

AAAS - Moves are afoot in the astronaut community to hustle the UN into
adopting a treaty which would set a deflection mission in motion if
Earth was threatened by a large asteroid impact.

A series of four meetings organised by the Association of Space
Explorers (ASE) will seek to draw up a protocol which the UN can act
upon when potentially Earthbound large objects are identified. The first
is set for Strasbourg in May, and the invited group of space,
engineering, legal and diplomatic luminaries will deliver its
recommendations to the UN, which is following the discussions.

Its success after that will be a matter for the politicians, said ASE
chairman and Apollo program astronaut Rusty Schweickart at the AAAS
meeting in San Francisco on Friday.

The measures the group will propose will include set responses to the
detection of an object aimed at cutting the time before a decision on
what action to take is made. The ASE has arranged the meetings without
governmental prompting "for the good of humanity". Schweickart said: "We
all know the difficulty the UN has in making any decision, let alone a
time-critical one."

The number of known near-Earth asteroids which have a chance of hitting
Earth in the next 100 years currently stands at 127, but that figure is
expected to rocket to as high as 10,000 by 2020 , after Congress changes
NASA's mandate to include surveying space for such threats. Schweickart
told reporters the boost in public awareness as more objects are
identified will force politicians to act. He said: "This is going to be
an inherently international decision. Whether they like it or not
they're going to have to do deal with it."

The biggest problem for any treaty as Schweickart sees it is the
inherently altruistic nature of anwering the problem - by funding a
global plan nations would have to accept individual sacrifices for the
good of the whole of planet. Familiarity with the toothless Kyoto
Protocol on climate change is instructive on how difficult that can be
to achieve.

He added that there would need to be an understanding from governments
that surveying the sky for threats needs to be thought of separately
from the rest of astronomy: "What we're talking about here is not a
science - what we're talking about is public safety."

That view was backed up by NASA Ames asteroid hazard chief David
Morrison, who said: "This has gone from being an esoteric statistical
argument to one about real events."

According to NASA shuttle engineer Edward Lu, the current favoured
method for deflecting an asteroid is known as a gravity tractor, which
would involved sending a space craft to "hover" close to the asteroid
and so gradually draw it off course by gravitational attraction. In the
case of the most recent headline-grabbing menace to humanity, Apophis
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/31/nasa_has_a_plan/>, it would
take a one tonne craft twelve days to deflect the asteroid one Earth's
radius.

The ASE workshops will aim to deliver a protocol to the UN in Spring
2009. Schweickart said: "We can't prevent a hurricane, we can't prevent
a tornado. But we can prevent an asteroid impact, and if we don't we're
not much past the dinosaurs."
Received on Mon 26 Feb 2007 05:14:24 PM PST