Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (14 page)

Preparing for Planetary Defense
described the problem at length, providing necessary background details on the objects, their destructive potential, and mentioning the usual suspects: the Tunguska and Chicxulub impactors and Shoemaker-Levy 9's attack on Jupiter. “Now that it is recognized that collisions with objects larger than a few hundred meters not only can threaten humanity on a global scale but have a finite probability of occurring, means for mitigating them seem clearly worth investigation,” Johnson stated emphatically up front. “It should also be recognized that the technology required for a system to mitigate the most likely of impact scenarios is, with a little concerted effort, within humanity's grasp.”
⁶
The technology consists of rockets carrying robots for distant intercepts that would deflect the approaching rock or comet—the old nudge-it-off-course-very-far-from-Earth technique—and a second requiring a forceful deflection with the use of “high energy options” that included nuclear and kinetic weapons that were then available and, within two decades, lasers and ultrahigh kinetic energy systems. And the paper looked to the distant future and mentioned antimatter weapons, mass drivers, solar sails that would use the Sun's radiant energy to gently push the rock off course, and, in a truly impressive leap of imagination, “asteroid eaters” that would infest it with devices that would replicate themselves by feeding on the asteroid itself. They would, in other words, cannibalize it. “Over the period of several months or a few years, these devices, recreating themselves into an army of thousands, could completely mine the asteroid away, or at least reduce it to a size that is no longer a threat or is more easily maneuvered by the propulsion technology.” Pushing the asteroid off course, gently or with force, seems more practical and effective than staging a long-duration banquet. And Johnson makes no
mention of excrement and what, if anything, to do with it. In any case, he did an enormous amount of homework, part of which included acquainting himself with
The Hammer of God
, which he was sure to mention.
⁷

Two other air force officers, Lt. Col. Rosario Nici and 1st Lt. Douglas Kaupa, wrote “Planetary Defense: Department of Defense Cost for the Detection, Exploration, and Rendezvous Mission of Near-Earth Objects,” which appeared in
Airpower Journal
in 1997. They did their homework, too. After describing the NEO situation and the requisite impact sites, including Meteor Crater and Jupiter's perforated atmosphere—but also Manicouagan crater in Quebec and Wolfe Creek Crater in Australia—Nici and Kaupa maintained that the US government, through the Department of Defense, “is obligated to protect the lives and safety of its citizens,” and that the nation “may use its armed forces, under the hierarchy of interests, for cases of strict humanitarian concern. Thus, responding to the NEO threat could be seen to fall under this policy.”
⁸
They noted that the chief of staff of the US Air Force had tasked Air Force Space Command to determine what would be needed for the defense of the planet by fiscal year 1997. Furthermore, an effective system had to include coordinated worldwide coverage of the sky, a determination of what sizes constitute progressively serious dangers, knowledge of the objects' composition to help mitigation strategy, rendezvousing with an NEO to study it up close, practicing attacking and destroying one, “capturing” and mining an asteroid, and setting up a system that would warn about “small” ones that could save lives and prevent tsunamis, earthquakes, and forest fires.

Nici and Kaupa also provided some cost guesstimates, which varied depending on the scope of the program, with $112 million a year for detection, exploration, and rendezvous over the course of twenty years being the minimum. “Assessing the NEO threat would be a small cost for insurance, whereas an
impact would cost billions of lives and trillions of dollars,” they concluded, yielding to the temptation to squander the obvious. “While there is no reason to fear NEOs daily, there is a finite probability another NEO will collide with Earth.” It was the old “not if but when” refrain yet again.
⁹

Given that the asteroid and comet threat is obviously international, the United Nations also got involved. In April 1995, the United Nations International Conference on Near-Earth Objects held a three-day meeting in New York that was organized by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs for two immediate purposes: (1) to make member states aware of the problem—to sensitize them, as its organizers put it—and (2) to expand the international detection and tracking system. Scientists from around the world met to discuss the NEO situation and, specifically, to collect and interpret scientific data that would shed light on impact history, evaluate then-current observations, and outline exploration missions that it believed would have to be undertaken (that is, go out and look at the things up close).

A total of forty-six papers were presented in five general areas: astronomy, Earth and planetary sciences, astronautics, detection and mitigation, and UN-related issues. Astronomy, as was to be expected, described the situation, including what is out there. “Meteoroid Orbits: Implications for Near-Earth Object Search Programs,” was one paper, for example, and “Long-Period Comets and the Oort Cloud” and “Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragment Size Estimates: How Big Was the Parent Body?” were two others. Earth and planetary sciences included papers on “Target Earth: Evidence for Large-Scale Impact Events” and “A Unified Theory of Impact Crises and Mass Extinctions: Quantitative Tests.” Gerta Keller, the Princeton geoscientist who insisted that the impact at Chicxulub occurred some three hundred thousand years before the K-T boundary, made that point again in a paper that was wryly titled “Asteroid Impacts
and Mass Extinctions—No Cause for Concern.” Astronautics had but four papers, including “High-Performance Ultra-Light Nuclear Rockets for Near-Earth Objects Interaction Missions,” while the detection-and-mitigation segment had eight papers, “Technology for the Detection of Near-Earth Objects” being a representative contribution. Four papers were delivered at the final meeting, which was about the United Nations' role, including “International Efforts toward the Spaceguard System” and “A Proposal to the United Nations Regarding the International Discovery Program of Near-Earth Asteroids.”
¹⁰

Six years later, with all of that information in hand, the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, or COPUOS, established the Action Team on Near-Earth Objects, or Action Team 14, as it was called. The “team” was mandated to review the content, structure, and organization of programs dedicated to planetary defense; identify gaps in the work that was going on, specify where additional international coordination was needed; note where other countries and organizations could make contributions; and propose steps for improving international coordination and collaboration with groups that had been formed specifically because of the NEO threat.

Action Team 14 issued its report on February 18, 2013—three days after the explosion over Chelyabinsk, which was an irony that Shakespeare would have savored. It recommended the formation of an international asteroid warning network, an impact disaster planning advisory group, and a space mission planning advisory group. The IAWN, as the first was called, would be a network of experts that would focus on the discovery, tracking, and observation of potentially dangerous NEOs. Once spotted, the objects' orbits would be predicted and any potential impact warnings would be sounded. The warning network would also prepare to go public with what it discovers while searching for more information and keeping COPUOS briefed. The IAWN was also supposed to report to the committee
every year on the overall NEO situation. The Impact Disaster Planning Advisory Group, or IDPAG, would review what was learned from other major disasters and prepare coordinated response plans and exercises, or drills, to address predicted impacts and those that come as a surprise. And the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, SMPAG (or “Same Page,” as it was called), would combine the voluntary expertise of spacefaring nations' specialists and recommend and promote research on missions that would mitigate attacks on an international, cooperative basis and develop technical concepts and propose operational programs. That could be accomplished only if everyone was, indeed, on the same page.
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By that time, science publications were paying attention to developments in the NEO realm, and so were the news media. The vast majority of news organizations reported developments, including the occasional “event,” like that explosion over the Eastern Mediterranean, accurately and unemotionally. The heyday of fireball sightings in New York was in the nineteenth century, and the
New York Times
, which was founded in 1851, covered many of them with a thoroughness and lack of sensationalism that became the self-styled newspaper of record's hallmark.

“This morning at 1:40 the most beautiful meteor seen in this vicinity for years flashed across the northern sky nearly from horizon to horizon,” a stringer in Utica wrote in 1875, using an uncharacteristic superlative. “Lake-side cottage in this pleasant summer resort had a narrow escape from destruction by a meteor last night,” read a dispatch from Schroon Lake, New York, in 1880.
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Recognizing the inherent danger of large NEOs, the
Times
; other mainstream newspapers; and weekly magazines such as
Time
,
Newsweek
, and the
Economist
reported the explosion over Chelyabinsk extensively, as accurately as possible, and with no blatant hype (as it is called in the newsroom).

It is appropriate to quote the
Times
again. “Gym class came to a halt inside the Chelyabinsk Railway Institute, the students gathered around the window, gazing at the fat white contrail that arced its way across the morning sky. A missile? A comet? A few quiet moments passed. And then, with incredible force, the windows blew in,” the Moscow bureau reported in a story that led the paper, meaning it “started” in column six, on the extreme right side of page one, then “jumped” to A8, where there was a picture of the meteor streaking across the sky and two “sidebars” that provided additional, supporting information. One of them, “A Flash in Russian Skies, as Inspiration for Fantasy,” quoted Stephen Baxter, the president of the British Science Fiction Association, as saying, “I think we got overconfident in the 1990s” with movies like
Armageddon
and
Deep Impact
, “when we thought we could fend off any threat,” he said. “H. G. Wells knew we couldn't.”
¹³

“The scenes from Chelyabinsk,” the story continued, “rocked by an intense shock wave when a meteor hit the Earth's atmosphere Friday morning, offer a glimpse of an apocalyptic scenario that many have walked through mentally, and Hollywood has popularized, but scientists say has never before injured so many people.”
¹⁴

A. C. Charania and Agnieszka Lukaszczyk may have read the
Times
's account of the mishap at Chelyabinsk and other accurate and evenhanded accounts of what happened, but they still expressed concern that the news media, which were commonly scorned for allegedly sensationalizing developments “to sell newspapers,” would overplay such stories. Charania worked for SpaceWorks Engineering, and Lukaszczyk was a space-policy consultant and a member of the Secure World Foundation. In a paper titled
Assessment of Recent NEO Response Strategies for the United Nations
, which was a thoughtful plan for how the United Nations should handle the NEO situation, they succumbed to warning about the hysteria-prone news media.
“There is concern that there will be many warnings with an associated over-reaction by the media and subsequently the public at large (i.e., multiple Apophis scenarios). Some people have speculated that this may not be a desirable situation and that we may require a coordinated ‘clearing house' to prevent such media excitement.” They used the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator that is underground on the Swiss–French border near Geneva, to make their point, mentioning some early news accounts that it would create a mini black hole that would devour the planet. That was accurate as far as it went, but they neglected to distinguish between the responsible print media and the rags, with their respective television equivalents. And a clearing house would, to some extent, centralize information at one source, which would amount to a degree of control that news media in free societies tend to find dangerous.
¹⁵

By then, the B612 Foundation, which came into being in October 2002, was playing a leading role in planetary defense. Mentioned earlier, in
chapter 2
, its name refers to the asteroid that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's little prince called home, but like the asteroid named Orpheus, the organization's name has reverse meaning. B612 definitely does not want to turn an asteroid into home, sweet home. The foundation grew out of a one-day workshop on asteroid deflection held at the Johnson Space Center on October 20, 2001, and was (and remains) a private foundation dedicated to finding potential impactors so far ahead of collision that they can be nudged off course by so-called space tugs the way ocean liners and other large ships are nudged by the nautical variety. It was invented by JPL's Clark Chapman and others, most notably Russell L. “Rusty” Schweickart and Ed Lu, by then veteran astronauts of the Apollo 9 lunar mission and the STS-84 and STS-106 shuttle missions, respectively.

The foundation's core project is a solar orbiting infrared
telescope that is appropriately named Sentinel and is designed to locate and catalog 90 percent of asteroids that are 140 meters or larger in diameter so that any headed this way can be pushed in another direction long before a possible collision.
¹⁶
(The mission is described in detail in
chapter 7
: “The Ultimate Strategic Defense Initiative.”)