Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (9 page)

The congressmen, clearly impressed by the presentations, reacted by reaffirming what NASA was already doing. They formally mandated it to catalog within a decade—by 2008—90 percent of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) a kilometer or larger, and that became the Spaceguard Survey. The name memorializes Arthur C. Clarke: Saint Arthur, the Visionary. Many others have decided to pay homage to Clarke the same way. The International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Near-Earth
Objects held a workshop in 1995, beginning the Space Survey, which led to the creation of the private, international Spaceguard Foundation that was started in Italy in 1996 and that is dedicated to discovering and studying NEOs. There is also a Japan Spaceguard Association (which is based in Tokyo) and the Bisei Spaceguard Center (also in Japan), which do the same thing. And Spaceguard UK operates the Spaceguard Centre in Knighton, which was set up to provide information on asteroid and comet impacts, to find ways of predicting them, and to get that information to the news media and educational institutions.

The relationship between Congress and NASA on identifying large NEOs became somewhat incestuous. The space agency announced that it planned to find and identify 90 percent of all NEOs that potentially threatened Earth. Then, as noted, Congress dutifully reacted by ordering NASA to find and identify 90 percent of all Earth-crossers that endangered the planet. The space agency reacted to the congressional order by proclaiming in September 2011 that, lo and behold, it had met the congressional goal and had found more than 90 percent of the rocks that could cause a planet-wide catastrophe.
²⁴

Not to be left out, the US Air Force issued a report,
Preparing for Planetary Defense: Detection and Interception of Asteroids on Collision Course with Earth
, a thirty-three-page canon that recommended that the Department of Defense take an active role in planetary defense. It credited Congress with understanding the danger and ordering the creation of the International NEO Detection Workshop that produced the Spaceguard Survey and an NEO Interception Workshop that met in 1992 to come up with ways to intercept, deflect, or destroy anything that appears to be on a collision course with Earth. Putting the situation in perspective, the report opened by matter-of-factly asserting the following:

Most humanity is oblivious to the prospect of cosmic collisions, but this hazard from space is a subject of deadly concern to the population of the planet. Work by several nationally recognized scientists who have been investigating this issue for a number of years, some for decades, has brought an awareness that, to the average citizen of the U.S., the risk of death may be just as great from an asteroid strike as from an aircraft accident. Those unfamiliar with these studies may find this incredulous when, in fact, there have been no recorded deaths due to asteroid strikes, albeit there have been close calls from small meteorites striking cars and houses. However, the probability is finite, and when it occurs, the resulting disaster is expected to be devastatingly catastrophic. But because we are dealing with events, time scales and forces well beyond the human experience, the threat is not universally recognized.
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With the public's ignorance established, the report went on to describe the danger, citing the Alvarez group's work, the extinctions, and comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's impending attack on Jupiter. Then it, too, called for an enhanced capability to find and characterize potential threats and come up with ways to prevent collisions. There are two ways to do that, the report stated: (1) propulsion, meaning a frontal attack to stop the asteroid by sending a rocket into it or by using nuclear energy and ultimately some hypervelocity, or antimatter weapons; and (2) deflection, which would involve nuclear and kinetic energy, lasers, and even putting solar sails on them that would gently move them off course.
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The august Federation of American Scientists put out its own report, which had the same title as the Air Force report and which essentially said the same thing, as well as what was in the NASA Spaceguard Survey: the threat had to be clearly defined and then mitigated with an international response.

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), which was started in 1963 as an amalgamation of the venerable and widely respected American Rocket Society and the American Interplanetary Society, has some thirty-five thousand
individual members and ninety corporate members. It therefore wields considerable power in the aerospace world and weighed in with a position paper in October 2004 whose title, “Protecting Earth from Asteroids and Comets,” got right to the point. It led off by suggesting that an organization be created within the US government that would be specifically responsible for planetary defense and would be an interagency office charged with dealing with “all aspects of Planetary Defense.” It also proposed that a senior-level inter-agency working group be formed to define the appropriate makeup and reporting structure of the organization, develop a plan that would lead to its creation, and procure funding for its support. The AIAA paper also called for the office to establish a formal procedure for getting word out when the probability of an impact exceeds specified thresholds. And since the threat is global, it recommended starting a dialogue among other nations and international institutions to characterize the challenges that would be involved in an international deflection program. Furthermore, it called for broadening the Spaceguard Survey to include one-hundred-meter and larger NEOs; get more information about asteroids (including by missions to them so deflection techniques could be developed); conduct actual flight tests to demonstrate the ability to change a potential impactor's orbit; and—getting to the human factor—sponsoring research to assess the political, social, legal, and disaster-relief consequences of a serious NEO threat, mitigation effort, or possible impact.

“While noteworthy efforts are being made to detect threatening objects,” the paper concluded, “Earth is effectively blind to NEO objects of a size range that could lead to immediate and long term deaths of thousands to millions of people and is unprepared should a short term threat be detected.”
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By suggesting that a national organization be created that would be responsible for overseeing the asteroid and comet threat, the institute was clearly implying that NASA had too
many other projects and programs to be able to adequately concentrate on this most important mission. That was not the case, though. If anything, the space agency needed a major program that would fill the void left by the ending of Apollo in 1972. It therefore decided that planetary defense should be handled by the space agency. Congress agreed. By 2005, the legislators were so concerned about the asteroid and comet population that the NASA authorization act substantially lowered the minimum size that had to be located and studied to 140 meters. Its charge to NASA clearly reflected its concern:

The Congress declares that the general welfare and security of the United States require that the unique competence of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration be directed to detecting, tracking, cataloguing, and characterizing Near-Earth Asteroids and comets in order to provide warning and mitigation of the potential hazard of such Near-Earth Objects to the Earth.

The Administrator shall plan, develop and implement a Near-Earth Object Survey program to detect, track, catalogue and characterize the physical characteristics of Near-Earth Objects equal to or greater than 140 meters in diameter in order to assess the threat of such Near-Earth Objects to the Earth. It shall be the goal of the Survey program to achieve 90 percent completion of its Near-Earth Object catalogue (based on statistically predicted populations of Near-Earth Objects) within 15 years after the date of enactment of this Act.
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That officially started the Spaceguard Survey, which stands as a milestone in the new quest for planetary defense.

The National Research Council (NRC), which is the investigative division of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's preeminent and ultra-prestigious science body, also took an interest in the menacing meteors and their icy cohorts. Its fourteen-member Survey and Detection Panel held three-day fact-finding hearings in Washington, Tucson, and Santa Fe in 2009, at which scientists, other specialists, and a NASA representative made presentations that described the NEO situation
in copious detail. As was customary, the presentations described what comets, asteroids, and their low-flying derivatives, meteors, are; what threat they pose; and how that threat can be (yes…) mitigated. Tucson may have been picked so attendees could supplement the scholarly presentations with a day trip to nearby Meteor Crater to see firsthand what the impactors their colleagues were describing could do.

Maj. Lindley N. Johnson, the NEO Observations Program executive of NASA's Planetary Science Division, presented an overview of the NEO situation. His presentation included an outline of the NEOs' history and what effects they would have, based on their size and average impact interval, starting with a puny meteor under fifty meters that would break up high in the atmosphere and cause no damage and progressing to ever-larger ones. Larger space objects that are bigger than fifty meters would cause a Tunguska-like event; bigger than 140 meters would cause a regional event; a kilometer or bigger would have a relatively serious global effect; and one that is ten kilometers or bigger, which occurs only once every one hundred million years would pack one hundred million megatons of explosive power and turn off the lights. That is, it would cause an extinction event. And Johnson mentioned a near-Earth asteroid known as 2004 MN4 Apophis (later renamed 99942 Apophis), which, as was discussed earlier, is appropriately named after the Egyptian serpent god that is the lord of chaos and darkness. It flies past Earth every seven years and, in 2013, came within nine million miles. The Apophis meteor caused some anxiety in 2004 when it was thought that there was a very slight possibility, soon shown to be wrong, that during its expected approach, it would crash into Earth in 2029. It will come around again in 2036, though astronomers have concluded that it will not be a threat then, either. It is therefore not a dreaded PHA: potentially hazardous asteroid.

In 2007, the Planetary Society organized a $50,000 competition to design an unmanned probe that would find Apophis and
follow it for almost a year, collecting data that could help determine whether it posed enough of a threat to warrant a mission that would deflect it. The society received thirty-seven entries from twenty countries and picked a design called “Foresight” by SpaceWorks Enterprises, a large US firm, which proposed a simple spacecraft that would orbit the asteroid for a month and then follow it around the Sun for ten more months to get enough information about the meteor's trajectory so the likelihood of an eventual impact could be calculated.
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In January 2013, four years after the meeting in Santa Fe, NASA decided that Apophis will make a relatively close approach in 2029—19,400 million miles—and will swing by again in 2036 at a greater distance, meaning a collision was ruled out. Since the asteroid is 325 meters in diameter, that was very good news indeed, because an impact would cause an explosion in the five-hundred-megaton range.
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The research presented at the three NRC meetings was duly published in 2010 in a definitive, understandable, and well-illustrated 144-page report titled
Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth-Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies
that had sections on risk analysis, the survey and detection of NEOs, their characterization by various observation techniques, ways to mitigate the threat, the need (again) for national and international cooperation, and what is required in the way of financial investment. (Ten million dollars a year would allow the current program to continue while, at the other end of the investment spectrum, $250 million annually would buy a robust program with redundant systems that would combine ground- and space-based observation and research on impact techniques for changing the orbit of a threatening asteroid: impacting an impactor, so to speak.)

“Impacts on Earth by Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are inevitable,” the report stated at the top of the chapter on mitigation. “The impactors range from harmless fireballs, which are very
frequent, through the largest airbursts, which do not cause significant destruction on the ground, on average occurring once in a human lifetime; to globally catastrophic events, which are very unlikely to occur in any given human lifetime, but are probably randomly distributed in time.” The report described the usual mitigation possibilities: slowly pushing or pulling the attacker off course, a kinetic impact that would shove it in another direction, or a nuclear blast that would decisively change its orbit. And in the event that any or all of those mitigation strategies failed, the report advised that a civil defense system be set up to evacuate a region that takes a small but direct hit.
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What Robert F. Arentz of the Boulder, Colorado–based Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., who was on the National Research Council's Survey and Detection Panel warned bears repeating: “It's not a matter of if,” he said, “it's a matter of when.”
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The prospect of Doomsday, or at least the threat of it, has fascinated people from time immemorial for three fundamental reasons.

For one thing, preventing it brings out the best of the human species, at least in terms of resourcefulness. Triumph over a formidable opponent is deeply pleasing because it honors and dignifies the human spirit. That is why underdogs who win are celebrated while there are usually no celebrations when overdogs (if they can be called that) are victorious. It is a formula that has always been understood by the coaches of teams that play competitive sports, by writers who craft both fiction and nonfiction stories, and by the producers and writers of war films who have the heroes suffer physical and sometimes mental injuries before they finally defeat the enemy by dint of sheer courage and reserve strength.

Then, too, the end of humanity would deprive the universe of wonderful and probably unique creatures (with all their apparent flaws). That makes us feel special and makes our fighting for survival rather than succumbing to extinction of the utmost importance. “Perhaps a sense of impending doom is necessary in certain situations to overcome complacency that might come with a misunderstanding of potential dangers,” Michael Moyer, an editor at
Scientific American
, has suggested. “If people all over the world had not been overwhelmed by the concern of possible extinction during the Cold War, there may have been a nuclear war with dire consequences. Even now this concern has to be constantly reinforced.”
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Most religions, on the other hand, assure their followers that belief in a supreme being will bring salvation—as it did to Noah and the creatures on his ark—and that the faithful who suffer will have eternal life, as did Jesus Christ. Death, even when it comes after excruciating pain, is therefore merely physical, not spiritual, and so it can be endured because it ends in immortality.

Both belief systems—the triumph over death and succumbing to it for spiritual salvation—make the possibility of Doomsday (that is, the end of the world and of all the life on it because of catastrophic destruction) endlessly fascinating. Whether the end can be prevented by bravery and intellect or accepted as the way to gain entry to heaven, it has always captivated a very large segment of humanity and continues to do so. Those people, in the many millions, are an eager audience for writers and others who describe the abiding dangers that threaten our existence and have the characters either fall victim to them but somehow survive anyway or find ways to thwart them, defeat them, by being imaginative, resilient, and heroic.

Homer (if it was Homer) was among the first, at least in the West, to glorify those traits in the
Iliad
and then in the
Odyssey
, in which Odysseus is triumphant over his powerful and implacable enemy, Polyphemus the Cyclops (the one-eyed son of Poseidon, god of the sea), because of his bravery and tenacity. Odysseus speaks of the transcendent virtue of literally as well as figuratively staying the course (or hanging in, as we have come to call it):

Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, Even so I will endure…. For already have I suffered full much, And much have I toiled in perils of waves and war. Let this be added to the tale of those.
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Given time (and returning home to domestic tranquility), the veteran of the war with the Trojans might have organized
a coalition among all the city-states that would have protected them from the Cyclops and ultimately killed it with a system that could have been called SEAGUARD. Homer would have appreciated what Arthur C. Clarke wrote in a distinctly similar vein, so it bears repeating:

Six hundred thousand people died, and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of time—was beyond all computation. It was as if a great war had been fought and lost in a single morning…. After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and a unity that no earlier age could have shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur again for a thousand year—but it might occur tomorrow. And the next time, the consequences could be even worse. Very well:
there would be no next time
…So began Project SPACEGUARD.
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That is ennobling. It is what makes Darwin not just scientifically important but, on a subtle level, inspiring. Survival of the fittest creatures is accomplished not by chance but through superiority; by a determination to overcome mortal challenges and either coexist within the environment or, if sheer existence is threatened, to dominate, vanquish, or destroy the challenger. The long history of warfare offers innumerable examples of the fate of those who lacked the will or capability to assure their survival and freedom. They were at the mercy of the enemy when war came, and the price they paid was subjugation, ruination, and often death.

Clarke and other science fiction writers have transgressed war between nations—mere political entities; the new city-states—and shown that the whole planet is at war with nature, with its environment, and has been since its creation. In that grand scheme of things, military conflicts between “sovereign” states are trivial since, where nature is concerned, they are in fact not sovereign at all. Ultimately, they exist at the whim of the outer world, of the universe, that surrounds them. They are
simultaneously nurtured by nature and at war with it, and the weapons that are arrayed against them extend from infectious microbes to some creatures on land and sea, to the weather, to the bowels of the planet itself, and to the large projectiles from space that constitute the hail of bullets. The large rocks and comets are the most interesting because, unlike diseases, they come from somewhere else—other worlds—so they are exotic, and there is no possibility of inoculation (at least not yet, if that metaphor is valid). And they are by far the most dangerous, even when all-out nuclear war is taken into account, since only one of them could end everything.

Clarke, who was highly knowledgeable about science and the environment in which Earth exists, understood that. So did Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein who, with Clarke, were the scientifically informed triumvirate of what is now called the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Clarke's
The Exploration of Space
,
The Exploration of the Moon
,
The Making of a Moon
, and
The Promise of Space
, among many other nonfiction works, initiated untold millions into the space fold and its infinite dimensions.

So did a science fiction masterpiece called
2001: A Space Odyssey
, a novel that grew out of a short story called “The Sentinel.” Film producer Stanley Kubrick picked up the novel and, along with Clarke, turned it into a film of the same name. The story is about a mission to Jupiter in which there are encounters with mysterious black monoliths that seem to be affecting human evolution. But there is a dramatic subplot about one of man's robotic creations, ostensibly his computerized mechanical servant, HAL 9000, that rebels and tries to assert its superiority by attempting to kill two astronauts while they are outside the spaceship on a mission beyond Jupiter. It succeeds in killing one of them, but the other makes it back inside with the other astronaut's corpse and methodically disconnects HAL's wiring while it gently pleads for its life to no avail. It was an effective
dramatization of the old theme of humankind's robotic creations rebelling, thinking for themselves, and turning on their masters, which was started by Mary Shelley when she published
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
in 1818. The film version of
2001: A Space Odyssey
, whose screenplay was written by Kubrick and Clarke, had mixed reviews but developed a cult following when it came out in 1968. Perhaps this was partly because, by sheer coincidence, it was followed by three astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission who became the first humans to see the far side of the Moon and an earthrise beyond the lunar horizon. They sent home television pictures of it for all the world to experience. The short story “The Sentinel,” the full-length novel derived from it, and the subsequent classic film stand as examples that show what imaginative and resourceful humans can do to survive their own technology and an intensely hostile environment.

That environment was described in harrowing detail by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in
Lucifer's Hammer
, which was published in 1977 and, thus, among the first works of fiction to try to anticipate how the survivors on a planet that is nearly annihilated handle the cataclysm and adapt to what it causes: a new ice age. In
Lucifer's Hammer
, a comet is spotted by a wealthy amateur astronomer named Tim Hamner and turned into a potential media event when it is determined that the boiling ice will pass close to Earth. After its discovery, a California senator named Arthur Jellison gets an Apollo-Soyuz mission to study “The Hammer,” as it is christened by the news media.

But then the comet breaks up, dumbfounding professional astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who were unable to track it, and it hits Earth like buckshot. Large chunks strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Those that hit land set off volcanoes and start earthquakes around the world, including one along the San Andreas Fault that severely damages California.
To make matters worse, the ones that hit the oceans cause tsunamis, inundating coastal cities, including Los Angeles, and millions perish. Hundreds of millions of hapless men, women, and children are exterminated around the world like vermin. Plagues break out and the climate changes, causing weeks of rain, which leads to flooding that wipes out crops and that, in turn, forces otherwise decent folks to scavenge, steal, use weapons for self-protection, eat rats and human corpses, and ultimately resort to cannibalism. Fearing that the new ice age is going to send desperate Russians south for warmth and food, China launches a preemptive nuclear attack on Russians cities, but the Caucasians stick together in the face of another Yellow Peril. Russia and the United States retaliate, effectively destroying China.

Meanwhile, Senator Jellison and other landowners create fiefdoms within his “Stronghold” in which ordinary workers are forced into subsistence farming like serfs while an evangelist named Henry Armitage teaches that The Hammer's arrival signals the joyful End Times. That is a theme that will recur in both apocalyptic fiction and fact. Jellison takes advantage of the crisis to become the Stronghold's strongman. He seizes control of the remnants of the US Army and, with bikers and other gang members, starts the New Brotherhood Army, which is headquartered in the Stronghold and maintains order through military discipline. Jellison has made himself the lord and master of his world. In that situation, the status of the police is diminished, and since he now makes the law, lawyers are unnecessary. But Hamner and his wife, Eileen, are determined to endure the carnage. And they do, showing that the survival instinct can triumph over even a cosmic catastrophe like being hit with the devil's gigantic hammer.

Reviewing
Lucifer's Hammer
for
Library Journal
, Judith T. Yamamoto said that it was full of “good, solid science, a gigantic but well developed and coordinated cast of characters, and about a megaton of suspenseful excitement.” She remarked
that the pro-technology pitch might turn off some readers, but “all in all it's a good book, if not a great one.”
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Many readers agreed. “This is 5-star sci-fi all the way! If all you read is the first 100 pages, however, you probably won't agree with that. You see, the first part of the book is a bit slow in getting moving, but that's because the authors introduce a whole string of characters [who] interact with one another as the story unfolds. And once the action starts, it doesn't stop. In fact, it makes you want to store some food, some water, some other things…and get ready for what COULD happen,” one wrote to Amazon.

As I started reading this book, I thought to myself, this book has many similarities with the movie
Deep Impact
. Was I ever wrong with that assumption! This book goes way beyond
Deep Impact
. It goes beyond it in that this book is not so much about events surrounding a comet-earth collision as it is about the aftermath, and how people do or do not cope with that kind of calamity. Imagine this…world-wide cataclysmic events wipe out the major governments on the planet—national, state, and local governments collapse, and people are left to fend for themselves. What will they do for food, shelter, personal safety, information, etc.? It's a whole new ballgame out there! The kinds of challenges described in the book bring out the best in some people, the worst in others, and trapped in the middle of everything that's happening are the characters you'll come to know quite well.
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“The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high,” a reviewer in the
Cleveland Plain-Dealer
, who seems to have savored the calamity, reported appreciatively. “Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival—a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known.”
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