Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (22 page)

A spacecraft belonging to the China National Space Administration, on the other hand, had a dramatic encounter with an asteroid while on a lunar mission. The probe, Chang'e 2, was launched in October 2010 to collect data on the Moon as part of the first phase of China's low-key but persistent lunar-exploration program that was planning an eventual soft landing on the Moon by a rover called Chang'e 3. Its predecessor, Chang'e 2, went into lunar orbit in late August 2011 and transmitted data home until mid-April 2012, when its controllers
ordered it to leave the Moon and head for 4179 Toutatis, a 4.5-kilometer-long asteroid with two distinct “lobes” that came within 585,000 kilometers of Earth—that is four times the distance to the Moon—on September 29, 2004.
²⁰
The asteroid has made several relatively close approaches to this planet, is due back in 2016 and 2069, and is listed as a potentially hazardous object even though the probability of its orbit intersecting Earth's is essentially zero for the next six centuries.
²¹

The grandiose plan to land taikonauts on the Moon, which reflected a determination to be recognized as the third superpower at the end of the twentieth century, is hardly mentioned during a time of economic problems and regional competition with Japan over tiny, disputed islands in the East China Sea. Beijing's interest in space, reflecting that pragmatism, is primarily military and commercial. The military dimension became clear when the People's Liberation Army blinded US reconnaissance satellites with ground-based lasers in 2006 and obliterated an aging weather satellite in an antisatellite test on January 11, 2007. That got the attention of the satellite-dependent US military and intelligence communities. In March 2013, Beijing announced that it was combining four maritime units into one superagency that a senior Chinese navy official described as an “iron fist.”
²²
And economic imperatives being what they are, China has concentrated its civilian space program overwhelmingly on carrying other countries' payloads—communication and weather satellites, for example—to orbit for profit. It can be deduced that the men who rule China from inside the secluded Zhongnanhai have decided to leave planetary defense to other nations and concentrate their country's resources on national, not international, defense in the most expansive meaning of the term; a healthy economy being crucial to national defense.

Having experienced Tunguska, Russians needed no reminder of the danger posed by NEOs, but Chelyabinsk brought it home yet again. So, barely four months after the explosion, on June
25, 2013, Vladimir Puchkov, the nation's emergencies minister, announced at a news conference in Moscow that his country and the United States would work together to improve protection against meteorites and other threats from space. “We have decided that the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency and Russia's Emergencies Ministry will work together to develop systems to protect people and territory from cosmic impacts,” he said. “I believe we can make a technological breakthrough in this area if the Emergencies Ministry and FEMA supervise this project, attracting the finest minds and research groups, including in Canada, Europe, China and Southeast Asia.”
²³

Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, announced almost simultaneously that it intended to develop a system of automated telescopes on Earth and in space that will warn of impending danger. And the system would be passive-aggressive, which is to say that an intercontinental ballistic missile would carry a small attack spacecraft to space and then launch it at any object that is confirmed to be a threat. Deputy Chief Designer Sergei Molchanov of the Makeyev State Rocket Center announced at the annual Korolev Readings forum in Moscow in January 2013 that the missile would launch a “destroyer” spacecraft known as a
kapkan
at the approaching impactor and either hit it head-on or push it off course. Hitting the NEO head-on would, in theory, be like launching an antiballistic missile (ABM) at an incoming warhead, which the United States has tested over the Pacific Ocean for years with a success rate of 50 percent. That is considered wholly inadequate given the consequences of a successful attack. But there would be a crucial difference between ballistic-missile defense and NEO defense. The ABM system has perhaps an hour to stop a warhead or a cluster of them, whereas the destroyer or its international counterpart would have months or hopefully years to stop the impactor.
²⁴

Two months later, on March 12, the head of Roskosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, announced that Russia intended to build
a shield to protect Earth from meteors and other things that come out of the sky as part of an international project that he said was called Citadel and that would cost some $500 million. “Roscosmos has formed a working group with experts from the defense ministry and the Russian Academy of Sciences to create a unified system of early warning and countering space threats,” he said.
²⁵

In announcing that Citadel was to be an international project, Popovkin did not seem to take into account the international defense plan that calls for a graduated response. Furthermore, Roskosmos had a distinctly poor record in following through with its NEO defense plans. Popovkin told legislators that a rough plan to deal with the asteroid threat would be in place by the end of 2013; Oleg Shubin, the deputy director of the nuclear agency's munitions-experiments division, said that intercepting an asteroid that is a kilometer or larger will definitely require a nuke. But the asteroid problem soon became moot, at least where Popovkin was concerned. Within five months of the announcement of the destroyer program, he was officially reprimanded by none other than Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, for incompetence because of a series of launch failures that embarrassed the Kremlin. Medvedev was a high-ranking official in the nation that opened the Space Age with
Sputnik
and followed it with Gagarin's and Tereshkova's flights and all the rest, so the fact that the launch failures angered him was entirely understandable, particularly with the ESA and Chinese programs in the ascendance (in both senses of the term).
²⁶
The incompetence extended well beyond the launchpads at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, near Tyuratam, on the desolate steppe in Kazakhstan, east of the Aral Sea. Roskosmos was being scorned internationally for coming up with elaborate planetary-defense plans that never seemed to materialize, and Popovkin took the hit for that, too.

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
(AIAA), which was started in 1963 with the merger of the venerable American Rocket Society and the American Interplanetary Society, took its place in planetary defense in 1990, right after Apollo Asteroid 1989FC passed within four hundred thousand miles of Earth—a veritable near miss in cosmic terms—and took the planet's inhabitants by surprise.
²⁷
That rock was larger than an aircraft carrier and crossed Earth's orbit at a point where the planet had been only six hours earlier. Had there been a collision, it was later calculated, it would have released the equivalent of as many as 2,500 one-megaton hydrogen bombs. And an impact in a large metropolitan area with high population density would have killed millions of people instantly without their even knowing what had happened. So, in 1990, the AIAA published a position paper, “Dealing with the Threat of an Asteroid Striking Earth,” which called for a systematic and open program to detect and define Earth-crossers so precisely that impacts can be predicted with some confidence. It went on to recommend that a study be done to specify the systems that would be able to detect, destroy, or significantly alter the orbits of those that are believed to be on a collision course with this planet.

The paper also suggested that the technology that was developed for US and Soviet space programs (it specifically mentioned the Strategic Defense Initiative) be studied for use against asteroids, although they would be used at far greater distances than they would have been to intercept ballistic missiles. The distance factor would be particularly important if the asteroid-busters are nuclear, which will most likely be the case (more about that further on). Even though it was published when the “giggle factor” was occurring in films and in other media, as was described in the
fourth chapter
, the paper was referred to more than two thousand times by 1993, making it the most cited AIAA position paper to that time.
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It was followed by one in 1995 that made the same recommendations
and that was very likely responsible, at least in part, for the creation of the Near-Earth Object Program Office.

The association took matters a giant step further when it held the first Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids, in Anaheim, California, on February 23–26, 2004. The meeting was historically important because it was an incubator in which most of planetary defense's nationally recognized stalwarts convened for the first time to present their work and get acquainted in a synergistic atmosphere. The participants included Andrea Carusi of the European Space Agency; Clark Chapman; Lindley N. Johnson of the Planetary Science Institute; John Logsdon of George Washington University; Ed Lu; Rusty Schweickart, then of the B612 Foundation; David Morrison, an astrophysicist and the director of space at the NASA Ames Research Center; Steven J. Ostro, a radar astronomer at JPL who was part of the team that discovered 222 NEAs, 130 of them that were potentially hazardous; Donald K. Yeomans; and Simon P. Worden, a retired air force brigadier general and a research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, who was a congressional fellow.

The meeting produced a white paper that summarized its conclusions, including recommendations to review international professional and amateur efforts to detect potentially threatening asteroids and comets and improve coordination—communication—among them, survey and catalog NEOs in the one-hundred-meter class, encourage the development of creative ideas for finding and cataloging potentially threatening long-period comets, develop and fund ground-based observation techniques and missions to the asteroids themselves, and establish a formal procedure for getting information out when the probability of an impact exceeds specified thresholds.

“This conference is the first of a series of the threat posed by Near Earth Objects, possible techniques and missions for deflecting an oncoming object, and political, policy and disaster-preparedness
issues associated with NEO deflection,” the paper said in summary. “The conference produced several recommended actions, the foremost being that we need to: 1) begin trust-building efforts so that claims that the NEO hazard is important will be considered credible by the public, even though we recognize that the probability of a disastrous impact is small; 2) increase our efforts to detect threatening objects and to determine the detailed physical and compositional properties of NEOs; and 3) move forward on means to deflect a threatening object. A key recommendation, consistent with previous AIAA Position Papers, is that a chain of responsibility be clearly and publicly defined for detecting and warning the public of threats, and mitigating those threats. These threats are real, and efforts to coordinate information and activities related to detecting and mitigating them should begin now…. Future impacts by comets and asteroids are a certainty,” the paper concluded. “Such impacts could have severe consequences—even ending civilization and humanity's existence. Life on Earth has evolved to the point where we can mount a defense against these threats. It is time to take deliberate steps to assure a successful defensive effort, should the need arise.”
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It is indeed time.

The gravity of the situation…impelled the AIAA to hold a second Planetary Defense Conference from March 5–8, 2007, that one at George Washington University in the nation's capital, very likely with the hope that it would draw reporters from the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
and, in the process, get some attention on Capitol Hill. That meeting also focused on detecting, characterizing, and mitigating NEOs, and there were also presentations and discussions on the political, legal, and societal challenges that would affect mounting a defense. As was the custom, the first day was, for the most part, spent describing the situation, including defining PHOs—potentially hazardous objects—that are fifty meters or larger and describing them. The second day was devoted to techniques that could
be used to deflect them or hit them head-on, breaking them into small fragments. The third day was about the likely consequences of impacts, such as tsunamis and overpressure from airbursts. A panel also considered legal issues that would arise in the testing and implementing of deflection, along with that, it considered ways to maintain funding for planetary protection. The last day was spent discussing the international decision-making process, which would necessarily depend on developing a working relationship within the international community and a consensus on what needs to be done.

“While significant scientific and technological advances have been made since the 2004 conference and are ongoing,” the concluding statement said, “it is clear that providing effective planetary defense from Near Earth Objects and planning for mitigation of an impact are in their infancy.” And the meeting's primary conclusions were articulated. The participants agreed with others who look for and are appropriately wary of NEOs that most civilization-ending, kilometer-size asteroids and comets have been located but that smaller ones in the 140- to 300-meter range could strike without warning and cause “serious loss of life and property over a broad area.” Earth-based radar antennas, such as the deep dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, are critical for providing the information that is needed for deflection which, the white paper noted, is still only in the conceptual phase. It also pointed out that there are serious technical and political issues, among others, in deciding whether and how to respond to a threatened impact and that a threat has never been seriously considered by any agency that would bear responsibility for dealing with it. Finally, the conference members went on record as noting, yet again, that the NEO threat is international and that it therefore demands international cooperation.