Russia, Europe may join forces to protect Earth from asteroids

[Kshasty]

Russian space officials and members of the European Commission will meet in early July to discuss joining forces against thousands of potentially hazardous asteroids, the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said.

Despite the growing concern about the asteroid threat, no anti-asteroid defense programs have been developed in practice so far, with only several theoretical concepts being studied. At a meeting in Moscow on July 7, the European Commission will consider Roscosmos's proposal to start a joint anti-asteroid project with the European Union.

"I received a letter, in which the European Commission proposes to meet on July 7 in Roscosmos with scientists and engineers of the Federal Space Agency, the Russian Academy of Sciences and other institutions and organizations. At the meeting, the Russian bid to start a joint project with the EU will be considered," Anatoly Perminov said.

In his Wednesday's report to Roscosmos, the head of the Astronomy Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Boris Shustov, said Russian scientists had detected a total of 6,960 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) as of April 10.

http://www.en.rian.ru/science/20100624/159552578.html

[BlueJazz]

1. As one of the Astronomers of the Mauna Kea Observatories said:

"It's not a question of IF an Astroid will threaten all life on this Planet..It's WHEN"

[HereSince1628]

2. Any excuse to keep paying astronomers to look at the sky

is a good one for a space institute.
Any excuse to develop weapons of defense is a good one for the empires.

Who could possible argue that protecting humanity is a bad thing?

[FarrenH]

3. An odd comparison

All of the sciences point to catastrophic mass global extinctions at regular intervals in the history of life on this planet, most of them caused by large objects hitting earth. The statement "its not IF, its WHEN" is therefore entirely realistic.

If we don't have a plan to counter observed threats and don't manage to get off the planet first, human civilisation WILL eventually be wiped out by rocks (or ice balls) from space. Statistically its a near-certainty. A 200km wide rock hitting mother earth will have about the same effect as every nuclear power on the planet launching their entire arsenal, and then some.

This is not a human induced threat, its not an excuse for astronomers to be paid to watch the sky. Its the convergent conclusion of many different sciences. Why you would compare it to "defence" departments used to wage wars of aggression is beyond me.

[HereSince1628]

7. I don't think it's really so odd.

Not knowing what is 'out there' is a significant hindrance to actually having good estimates on the likelihood of an impact per year, per decade, per century, per millenium.

That need can only be met with money spent on surveillance of space between here and at least the Oort Cloud. That's a great thing for the development and support of interplanetary astronomy, i.e. astronomers. I don't argue that isn't true or isn't needed.

Governments MUST justify spending, even on international projects that share costs. Just try to name 1 current international project that has both a mandate and dedicated funding to operate until 2250 CE.

Development of the needed technology for a defense against spaceborne apocalypse; WITS something significant enough to identify, target and move a 200km boloid traveling at a couple of tens of thousands of miles per hour is NOT justifiable in the short run on the low probability of a strike within foreseeable budget cycles, but it IS justifiable terms of the technological 'spin-offs.' And most of those spin-offs are going to be applied first in the area of military space defense.

It's just the ugly reality of trying to get funding.

[Pholus]

4. Spoken just like Bobby Jindal the Volcano Expert.

Volcano monitoring -- who needs it?

And Jindal was complaining about $140 million dollars a year. The Obama administration QUADRUPLED Bush's budget for near earth asteroids to the whopping level of $16 million just this year. Yeah, the budget of a medium sized building contractor for the entire research field with global consequences. And that is after a factor of four increase.

An asteroid is the LEAST likely natural disaster, but the only one that can be predicted 200 years in the future. Are you telling me that $16 million dollars a year for that information is too expensive?

BTW this article is wasting your time. A real deflection effort would cost about 5% of the country's GDP and require about 10 years. Nobody is going to do it if there is not a known need, provided by that jobs program you're worried about. The Russians have been talking big about making a deflection program for years, I can give you some clippings from 10 years ago when they have almost the exact same quotes as this article. Good to see that the press does its job and understands the history before they write their next story.

Yes, you struck a nerve here. I don't search for them actively any more, but it was far from being some kind of cushy jobs program. I signed up because I wanted to find these things as my way to contribute to humanity. Six years, over 400 nights alone on a mountain away from my new family, at a salary which was so lavish that it tripled when I finally quit and took a job elsewhere.

Yeah, roll out the gravy train baby!!!! We were just scaring people to make the big bucks!

Sheesh!

Okay, I calmed down enough to read the article. Yes, this guy quite probably is looking for a free ride by threatening people. I'll do a full review in the next post.

Sorry, HereSince1628....

[Pholus]

5. And a critique of the article too.....

> Despite the growing concern about the asteroid threat, no anti-asteroid defense programs
> have been developed in practice so far, with only several theoretical concepts being studied.

Cost is the main issue. With the possible exception of the gravitational tug (which requires years
to work) it's expensive.

We haven't developed a program because the estimated cost is about 5% of GDP over 10 years for a short
notice (3 year) deflection. It is cheap, however, to look for them and the risk is low enough that
there is insufficient urgency to do both at the same time.

> At a meeting in Moscow on July 7, the European Commission will consider Roscosmos's
> proposal to start a joint anti-asteroid project with the European Union.

This has been proposed many times before. I was a referee for a prototype system not by this guy
but another Russian group. Needless to say, it wasn't a serious effort. Actually, it had a lot of
wood building materials in the budget that suspiciously didn't seem to be very related to a spacecraft.

> In his Wednesday's report to Roscosmos, the head of the Astronomy Institute at the Russian
> Academy of Sciences, Boris Shustov, said Russian scientists had detected a total of
> 6,960 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) as of April 10.

Detected is not discovered. Detected is when you have a known object with a known orbit then you
point your telescope at the expected position and see if it is there and give orbit refinement positions.
There are millions of detections of near earth asteroids. By the metric of the article, software that
I wrote is responsible for 10% of the near earth asteroid detections over the last century. ;)

Look here for the real discovery statistics:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/

The Russian effort is included under "all others". Add to that they're not the dominant player by far in
that category.

> The Roscomos TV said on its website that calculations, based on results of nuclear weapon
> tests, show that an asteroid of 1-2 km in diameter is enough to cause a catastrophic shift in
> the global climate.

Density of asteroid, 3.5 g/cc
volume of asteroid, 4/3 pi (1000 m)^3
Typical velocity: 30 km/sec

Yes, that is a lot of kinetic energy. There is a formula for the crater size that gives the
number they mention. Google will help you find it. I give this calculation to my sophomore
students taking intro astronomy. I'm not impressed by this calculation in a major news article.

> The leading space countries have already launched their projects to track down
> potentially dangerous asteroids, including

> NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT)

Defunct circa 2005

> Deep Space 1

Not a tracking mission, physical studies of one object.

> Deep Impact, Dawn and Stardust, as well as ESA's Rosetta and JAXA's Hayabusa.

Ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto and ditto.

Okay, so maybe the last poster I trashed was more perceptive than I gave him credit.
This guy in the article isn't really up on the issue.

[Lorien]

6. So we can't plug a leaking pipe in the ocean floor

but we CAN save ourselves from asteroids. M'kay.

[Posteritatis]

9. It's almost as if those are two very different problems or something. (nt)

[Fumesucker]

8. There is a pretty decent program just starting to find asteroids/comets..

1,400 megapixel cameras connected to computer controlled telescopes that will image the entire sky about once a week on the average.

http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/

Pan-STARRS -- the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System -- is an innovative design for a wide-field imaging facility being developed at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy.

By combining relatively small mirrors with very large digital cameras we will be able to develop and deploy an economical observing system that will be able to observe the entire available sky several times each month.

The immediate goal of Pan-STARRS is to discover and characterize Earth-approaching objects, both asteroids & comets, that might pose a danger to our planet.

The huge volume of images produced by this system will provide valuable data for many other kinds of scientific programs.