Congress held its third hearing earlier this week on the potential threat asteroids pose to Earth. The hearings come in the wake of the asteroid explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, last February, which injured about 1,500 people and left the region scrambling to repair damaged buildings.
NASA, which identifies, tracks, and catalogs potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, has not so far detected any space rocks that pose a threat to civilization any time this century. Nevertheless, there may still be many potentially dangerous Near Earth Objects (NEOs) on a collision course with Earth, according to Ed Lu, a former astronaut, who testified before the House Space, Science, and Technology Committee. Lu’s B612 Foundation, which is trying to raise funds primarily from philanthropists to build a space-based infrared telescope, has announced plans to place the telescope in a special orbit around the Sun to get a better view of NEOs.
“NASA has not even come close to finding and tracking the 1 million smaller asteroids that might only wipe out a city,” Lu said. “We can protect the Earth from asteroid impacts, but we can’t do it if we don’t know where the asteroids are.”
According to written testimony provided to Congress by Donald K. Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the destructive February impact over Russia and the close fly-by that same day show that “even extremely improbable events can happen, and that it is prudent to pay attention to the problem of finding and tracking all potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids.” Yeomans is one of the world’s leading authorities on identifying, tracking and cataloging NEOs as part of a NASA program that was mandated by Congress in the 1990s.
Yeomans noted that scientists are not necessarily helpless in the face of threats by asteroid impacts. He pointed out that spacecraft could be programmed to collide with an asteroid headed Earth’s way, thereby “modifying its orbital velocity by a very small amount, so that over several years its trajectory would be modified and its predicted impact of Earth in the future avoided by a safe margin.”
Congressman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican and chairman of the House Space committee, concurred, saying it was disturbing that scientists had only identified about 10 percent of asteroids capable of demolishing a city.
In addition to tracking and cataloguing NEOs, NASA has sent robotic probes to study them. The next U.S. probe, OSIRIS-Rex, is planned for launch in 2016. President Barack Obama’s proposed 2014 budget includes funding to beef up NASA’s efforts to identify and track potentially destructive NEOs.
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Congress is taking asteroid threats seriously - Science Recorder
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