Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (15 page)

The B612 Foundation is dedicated to “opening up the frontier of space exploration and protecting humanity from asteroid impacts,” Lu explained in March 2013 at a Senate hearing that was called so the impact risk and preventive measures could be assessed. “On June 28, 2012, the Foundation announced its plans to carry out the first privately funded, launched, and operated interplanetary mission—an infrared space telescope to be placed in orbit around the Sun to discover, map, and track threatening asteroids whose orbits approach Earth.”
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That is Sentinel, a 7.6-meter infrared telescope that is being built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. It is designed to orbit the Sun at the same distance as Venus and to look in this direction with the Sun effectively at its back all the time so its vision will be continuous and it won't need the astronomical equivalent of sunglasses. It is being designed to locate 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters and half of those larger than 50 meters. The total cost of building, launching, and operating Sentinel is expected to be about $400 million, which, given its mission, is absolutely inconsequential.
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Clark R. Chapman, a recognized expert on NEOs and coauthor with David Morrison of
Cosmic Catastrophes
(a readable rundown of all sorts of space-related life-threatening situations, including asteroid impacts), testified on the NEO impact threat before Congress in May1998, when the danger was coming into sharp focus. He led off by dismissing impacts like the one that occurred in
Deep Impact
and that would create a new Dark Age as happening only once every one hundred
million years and that the chance of it occurring in the twenty-first century are one in a million.

“A more serious problem, and one that we
can
do something about, is the chance that a smaller asteroid or comet, about a mile wide, might hit,” Chapman said. “The best calculations are that such an impact could threaten the future of modern civilization. It could literally kill billions and send us back into the Dark Ages. Such an impact would make a crater twenty times the size of Meteor Crater in Arizona. The gaping hole in the ground would be bigger than all of Washington, D.C., and deeper than 20 Washington Monuments stacked on top of each other,” he continued, no doubt getting the rapt attention of the members of Congress by raising the specter of where they were disintegrating in an explosion that would make terrorist attacks look like fireworks displays. The answer, Chapman said, echoing the revealed wisdom, is to first find out whether a mile-wide asteroid is headed this way. “We simply haven't been looking hard enough,” he continued. “As the rates of discovery, of objects both large and small, goes up and the public becomes more aware of the danger from the skies, it will be essential that planetary protection be elevated from a sideline activity of a few astronomers, and some passionate amateurs, and be put on a sound, appropriately funded footing. The cost is not large. I believe that
Deep Impact
has already taken in more money at the box office than the cost of the entire Spaceguard Survey, from beginning to end. Astronomical programs are comparatively cheap. The really large expenses involve implementing mitigation hardware—rockets and bombs. Fortunately that won't be necessary until a threatening, mile-wide object is found to be headed toward Earth…and then, surely there will be no debate about using nuclear weapons in space—just once—to save civilization from catastrophe.” And Chapman, too, saw fit to mention “the visionary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.”
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The Spaceguard Foundation, which takes its name from the visionary's planetary-defense system, is also dedicated to analyzing the danger and doing something about it. It was started in Rome in 1996 by Gene Shoemaker; Duncan Steel, an Australian astronomer and the author of
Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets
; Andrea Carusi, an Italian astronomer; and the International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Near-Earth Objects. The foundation's stated goals are to promote “the protection of the Earth environment against the bombardment of objects of the Solar System (comets and asteroids).” Specifically, it is to coordinate the discovery and sizing up of NEOs internationally, study the mineralogical characteristics of minor bodies in the Solar System (particularly NEOs), and promote and coordinate a ground network (and possibly a satellite network) of radar and other sensor installations, which it called the Spaceguard System. It is based in Frascati, Italy, and is also private and nonprofit. There are other Spaceguard foundations or associations in Croatia, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Spaceguard UK is also known as the International Spaceguard Information Centre, but that does not mean it does public relations in the sense that many other “information” outlets do it. The center is a working observatory near Knighton, in Wales. It became operational in 2001 after being founded by Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore, a very accomplished, quintessentially eccentric, English character—a veritable institution, as his countrymen correctly put it. In fact, he began wearing a monocle at age sixteen, lied about his age to get into the Royal Air Force, developed an interest in astronomy when he was six and became a well-known amateur astronomer, was the author of more than seventy books on that subject, was the moderator of the BBC's long-running
The Sky at Night
series, became the president of the British Astronomical Association, was a self-taught glockenspiel and piano player, was a prodigious fiction writer, and was
an implacable and outspoken opponent of fox hunting (which he called a “blood sport” where animals are killed for fun). Spaceguard UK is the hub of the Comet and Asteroid Information Network (CAIN), which coordinates information on NEOs with other organizations around the world, certainly including NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

ESA does not like to be thought of as tilting at windmills, but it nevertheless named its major project, two spacecraft on an asteroid collision mission, Don Quijote. The first spacecraft, Sancho, was supposed to orbit an asteroid for several months and study it. Then a second spacecraft, Hidalgo, was supposed to crash into it, whereupon Sancho was to look over the asteroid to see how the impact changed its shape, internal structure, orbit, and rotation. ESA had two possible target asteroids in its sights: one named Amor 2003 SM84, and the other 99942 Apophis (which is named after that evil ancient Egyptian serpent mentioned in an earlier chapter).

The Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) knows where Apophis and a lot of other asteroids are. It was created because of that 1998 congressional order to NASA to identify 90 percent of Near-Earth Asteroids a kilometer or larger (later reduced to 140 meters) within ten years. The survey got its name because it is in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, Arizona, which puts it within commuting distance of the University of Arizona's world-class Department of Astronomy. The inbreeding has produced impressive results. Using telescopes on two mountains in the area and a third in Australia for “down-under” coverage, the CSS has turned up more than 2,500 NEOs, including potentially dangerous asteroids and some comets. The Lincoln Laboratory at MIT runs the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program, which was started in 1998 and is funded by NASA and the US Air Force. It uses two electro-optical deep-space surveillance telescopes at the White Sands Missile Range in Socorro, New Mexico, where the Pentagon tested ballistic and other missiles
during the Cold War. It had discovered 2,423 NEOs and 279 comets by September 2011.
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Pan-STARRS, the Panoramic-Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, operates on a mountain on Maui, Hawaii, is run by the University of Hawaii, and is largely funded by the air force. All of the above (and some others) report what they find to the Minor Planet Center—technically the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory—in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is affiliated with the Harvard College Observatory and operates under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union.

The Planetary Society was founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan; Bruce Murray, a leading Caltech/JPL planetary scientist; Louis Friedman, another Caltech/JPL space explorer; and Bill Nye, who began his career as a mechanical engineer at Boeing and then found his calling and blossomed as an effervescent science educator, actor, writer, comedian, and talk-show host, and as “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” the star of a Disney/PBS children's science show. The society encourages public membership and was created to encourage humankind's presence in space, Solar System exploration, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the study of NEOs. It supports NEO research by awarding annual Shoemaker grants that, in 2013, to take one example, came to $34,307 split among five winners. “As the Chelyabinsk impact demonstrated, asteroid impacts happen; they are dangerous, destructive, with no regards for human life,” Nye said as the award recipients were announced at a planetary-defense conference in Flagstaff, Arizona. “Tonight we honor citizen scientists, amateur and professional astronomers who make tens to hundreds of thousands of follow-up NEO observations each year, and their work is the key to determining NEO orbits and protecting life on Earth.”
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Like just about everyone else in the NEO club, the members of the Planetary Society have called for finding out what, exactly, the threat is, and they have suggested gaining access to US military surveillance satellite data—that's the black (for
secret
)
program run by the National Reconnaissance Office—for small-scale impacts in the atmosphere. It also provides a probability table on its website that was compiled by Clark R. Chapman and David Morrison that shows the chances of an individual dying from selected causes in the United States. A motor-vehicle accident tops the list with 1 in 100, followed by murder (1 in 300), fire (1 in 800), firearms accident (1 in 2,500), passenger-aircraft accident (1 in 20,000), flood (1 in 30,000), and then asteroid/comet impact (1 in 40,000).

The society parts company with most other NEO groups by claiming that the comets, the asteroids, and their derivatives are not (pardon) an unmitigated menace. It in effect says that all the emphasis on asteroids being a menace ignores their positive aspects.

Finally, it is vital to evaluate whether Near-Earth Objects really are our foes or our friends. Over the next three centuries, there is a 1 in 30 chance that a Tunguska-like impact will result in some human casualties and a 1 in 3,000 chance for a larger, global-scale impact. A Spaceguard survey, however, is certain to find in near-Earth orbits several thousand non-threatening objects that are more accessible than the Moon in terms of rocket propulsion. Over the next three centuries (and hopefully sooner), these objects can provide intermediate mission destinations as we prepare for long-duration human flights to Mars. As we begin to utilize space, the metals and volatiles (chiefly water) we find in these objects may become vital space resources. Thus, in taking a long view of only a few centuries, it is most likely that we will know the Near-Earth Objects as our friends. The lesson for us now is to keep in mind that all friends need respect.
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The Planetary Defense Foundation is an international network of amateur and professional astronomers that calls itself a company. Its purpose is to understand and protect Earth by analyzing data based on the discovery of asteroids and comets in the Solar System and to share the discovery of new NEOs through a grid network that uses electronic imagery.

The Secure World Foundation was created to accomplish what its name says, and it therefore definitely does not see NEOs as beneficial. It is a rarity in the planetary-defense network: a family operation. It was started in 2002 by Marcel and Cynda Collins Arsenault, two exceedingly well-off Coloradans (he owned more than $200 million in commercial real estate alone in 2013) with a serious penchant for philanthropy who became obsessed with the goal of promoting a secure, sustainable, and peaceful environment in space for the stability of Earth. With the Cold War over, the Arsenaults decided that the time was right for an international effort to finally use all of space for the benefit of humanity; that it is an environment with an infinite capacity to help this civilization and the planet as a whole. He became the founder and president of the Arsenault Family Foundation and One Earth Future, and she, with forty years' experience in nonprofit work, including work in prisons, mental health, disability rights, Girl Scouts, 4-H, and environmental issues, became the foundation's chairman of the board.

The foundation's stated mission is to work with governments, industry, international organizations, and civil society to develop and promote ideas and actions for international collaboration that achieve the secure, sustainable, and peaceful uses of outer space. “As a global commons over which no country has sovereignty, outer space presents a particular challenge to the international community,” they said in articulating the organization's challenges.

The foundation holds the core belief that without international cooperation focused on creating appropriate institutional and legal mechanisms to govern behavior in outer space the world could suffer the well-known ‘tragedy of the commons.' This refers to a dilemma in which multiple actors, working independently, and rationally consulting their own self-interest, ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for that to happen. Articulating measures to prevent the loss of use of outer space is one of the primary motivations
for forming Secure World Foundation. Cooperative and collaborative solutions for space sustainability and usability also provide increased interdependence and interconnectedness on Earth, which increases the world's security.
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And security means, among other things, defense against NEOs in what the foundation, echoing Shoemaker, called “a shooting gallery.” The Arsenaults made it clear on their website that they understood the danger and the defensive requirements, but that did not interest them so much as “appropriate governance” and “facilitation and information sharing.” The first had to do with how the world could organize to meet the challenge of mitigating the effects of an incoming impactor. “Planetary defense poses significant policy and legal challenges which echo some of the same problems found in other areas of the outer space realm. These include space situational awareness, data sharing, collective security, and shared decision making.” The second, “facilitation and information sharing,” had to do with being a source of information for individual nations, the international community as a whole, and the national space agencies to warn about the common danger. It also had to do with the promotion of dialogue and cooperation among all of them. “The Foundation has a strong interest in contributing to the important task of creating an internationally agreed upon plan and guidelines for responding to a NEO threat. Hence, the Foundation has partnered with the Association of Space Explorers and other organizations to assist the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to develop an appropriate international agreement for responding to the NEO threat.”
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