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.11
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 1880.12 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.”)
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.”17 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.18
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.”19
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 lo
t 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 2011.20 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.
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