In the wake of Earth’s largest meteor strike in more than a century, the world’s attention has turned skyward.
The 17-meter bolide exploded in the air over the Chelyabinsk region of Russia on Feb. 15, shattering windows and injuring around 1,000 people. But had the meteor come in at a slightly different angle, the space rock could have impacted the ground and the fallout could have been much worse.
More money is already flowing toward future asteroid detection and mitigation strategies, but we may never be able to fully protect ourselves.
There are plenty of programs already in place for monitoring relatively large near-Earth objects, and more will be coming online soon, both from government space agencies and the private sector. However, even the best efforts will not be able to catch objects the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor — rocks that are small enough to evade detection by current technology until they are streaking through Earth’s atmosphere, but large enough to be dangerous.
The technology to actually stop any killer asteroids that we do manage to detect is also far in the future. Many techniques have been proposed, including using nuclear missiles, laser beams, or even spray paint, but none are proven or anywhere near becoming reality. A lot more research and development as well as an unprecedented international effort will be needed before we can even begin to be protected.
But we’re working on it.
Certain scientists and members of the spaceflight community have long and vocally advocated for better methods to track potentially dangerous objects and more funding for mitigation research. But the odds have always been small and attention to this potential natural disaster has mostly been on the back burner. The probability remains the same — Chelyabinsk-like events tend to occur between once every 10 years to once every century — yet now people’s attention has been refocused.
Simply looking for potentially hazardous asteroids is one of the most important parts of this effort, said physicist and former astronaut Ed Lu, who helped found the B612 Foundation, a private non-profit dedicated to spotting dangerous objects from space.
Asteroid orbits can be easily estimated once they’re spotted, potentially giving years or even decades of advanced warning to civilization. Astronomers already know of more than 400,000 asteroids, of which 6,500 pass near the Earth, but there are many gaps and uncharted objects that could still pose a danger.
“How stupid if we got hit because we weren’t looking?” said Lu. “That seems crazy to me.”
In 1992, a congressional study named the Spaceguard Survey Report recommended that NASA find 90 percent of all near-Earth asteroids more than 1 kilometer in size within 10 years, a goal mandated by Congress six years later. In 2005, the target was redefined to spotting 90 percent of objects 140 meters or larger. Perennially underfunded, the project last year received less than half of the money it needed to complete its task. But since the Chelyabinsk event, members of Congress from both parties have written statements and op-eds rallying greater support for these efforts.
Unfortunately, U.S. legislators are preoccupied with other issues for the time being. Budgetary squabbles may lead the country to gut a significant portion of national spending as part of the sequester, including NASA funding.
While no new money is likely to be coming to asteroid-spotting activities, the Russian strike may cause “a shift in priorities to looking at this more than we have at the past,” said space policy expert Henry Hertzfeld of George Washington University.
source --
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/02/asteroid-watching-mitigation/
Subject: Efforts to Protect Earth From Asteroids Are Under Way!!!! 
Sat Feb 23, 2013 9:35 am
