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

by William E. Burrows

  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.”21

  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.22

  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.23

  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.”24

  In common with the rest of the planetary-defense community, the Secure World Foundation was and remains emphatic about the danger being global and that it therefore requires a unified international response.

  Kirill Benediktov heartily agreed. He was a bestselling Russian author, historian, and policy analyst who made a presentation, “The Asteroid-Comet Danger and Planetary Defense: A View from Russia,” at the opening session of the Schiller Institute conference in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on April 13–14, 2013. The institute is an international political and economic think tank with headquarters in Germany and in the United States. After the obligatory references to Halley's Comet, Tunguska, and Chelyabinsk, and after noting that Apophis will have a “dangerously close encounter” with Earth in 2029 and 2036 and perhaps cause a “catastrophe on a planetary scale,” Benediktov quoted Boris Shustov, the director of the Russian Academy of Science's Institute of Astronomy, as saying that the number of potentially Earth-threatening objects is between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand—only two percent of which have been identified.

  “We need to significantly increase the effectiveness of currently available ear
ly warning systems…. We need to create a single planetary network for detection and prediction of asteroid and comet hazards.” The network should include both already-existing centers, such as the Minor Planet Center, JPL, and the laboratory at the University of Pisa, and new ones, he said. “As for Russia, the work ongoing within individual institutes and research institutions should be systematically organized; a single coordination point has to be set up for data collection and processing. This center should be formed initially as a node of the global (supranational) network.”25

  Then Benediktov startled the audience by quoting Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin, his country's representative to NATO, as proposing a civilian-military defensive system that would not only protect the planet from asteroids, comets, “and other space objects,” but also from the respective superpowers’ intercontinental ballistic missiles; in other words, an international ballistic-missile defense system. “Rogozin stressed that the idea of such a major project under the auspices of the U.N., among other things, gives Russia an opportunity to seize the strategic initiative from the U.S.A. in deploying a global BMD system, including its segment in Europe. It will also make it possible to ‘package’ a decision on establishing a truly unified and joint European missile defense system into a major civilian project for space exploration in which Russia has its own unique scientific, practical, and industrial role to play. Essentially,” Kirill Benediktov said, “Russia and the United States could take on a noble mission to save the planet.”26

  That is what Congress had in mind when it stipulated in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 that NASA ask the National Research Council, which is the investigative arm of the august National Academy of Sciences, to conduct a study of near-Earth-object surveys and hazard mitigation strategies. That resulted in the creation of the ad hoc Committee to Review Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies, which, in turn, formed a Steering Committee, a Survey and Detection Panel, and a Mitigation Panel.27 The panels met to hear experts—astronomers and other scientists—explain the nature of the situation so the extent of the danger could be determined.

  The Survey and Detection Panel met at the National Research Council's headquarters in Washington on November 5–7, 2008, to get the procedure straight. Then it heard testimony there at the end of January 2009, followed by a meeting in Tucson on April 20–22, and a wrap-up session in Santa Fe on July 13–15. The panel's fourteen members were treated to a tour of the Catalina Sky Survey operation while they were in Tucson.

  The presentations—scores of them—were appropriately specific and detailed. A representative of Northrop Grumman talked about ASTER, an “Asteroid Structure, Trajectory, and Exploratory Reconnaissance Mission” that could have been sent to size up Apophis. Jon D. Giorgini of JPL and his colleagues described an “Improved Impact Hazard Assessment: Existing Radar Sites and a New 70-m Southern Hemisphere Radar Installation,” while Mark Boslough of the Sandia National Laboratories briefed the panel on “Modeling the Effects of Small NEOs: Low-Altitude Airbursts” (noting that the Tunguska forest was full of dead and rotting trees before that meteor burst clobbered much of what was left standing). And Joseph A. Nuth III of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, to take one more example, held forth on “Diogenes A: Diagnostic Observation of the Geology of Near Earth Spectrally-Classified Asteroids.”

  All the presentations were deftly consolidated into a single volume, replete with excellent illustrations, called Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies that was published by the NRC in 2010. It amounted to a briefing manual whose chapters covered risk analysis, survey and detection of NEOs, their characterization and mitigation, challenges of researching the subject, and, inevitably, national and international coordination and collaboration.

  The chapter on mitigation showed that the sixteen members of the panel that produced it were well aware of the scenarios that had been worked out by other organizations involved in planetary defense, including the space agency and the B612 Foundation. It therefore suggested four progressively decisive courses of action: (1) civil defense, which would involve evacuating the region around a small impact; (2) the slow push or pull method, which would gradually change the orbit of an NEO so that it misses Earth; (3) the kinetic-impact approach, which would hit the asteroid or comet head-on with so much momentum and energy that it would be abruptly knocked off course; and, if all else fails, (4) using that nuclear warhead to change its orbit. The committee wrote:

  Nuclear explosives constitute a mature technology, with well-characterized outputs. They represent by far the most mass-efficient method of energy transport and should be considered as an option for NEO mitigation. Nuclear explosives provide the only option for large NEOs (> 500 meters in diameter) when the time to impact is short (years to months), or when other methods have failed and time is running out.28

  The NRC was also on the same page as the rest of the planetary-defense sector where the need for international cooperation was concerned:

  Responding effectively to hazards posed by Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) requires the joint efforts of diverse institutions and individuals. Thus organization plays a key role that is just as important as the technical options. Because NEOs are a global threat, efforts to deal with them may involve international cooperation from the outset…. Arrangements at present are largely ad hoc and informal in the United States and abroad, and they involve both government and private entities.29

  To solve that problem, the committee recommended that “the United States should establish a standing committee, with membership from each of the relevant agencies and departments, to develop a detailed plan for treating all aspects of the threat posed to Earth by Near-Earth Objects.” And, the report added, “The United States should take the lead in organizing and empowering a suitable international entity to participate in developing a detailed plan for dealing with the NEO hazard.”30

  That made the course of action compelling and unanimous, but only among the experts in the global community, not among their political leaders.

  A specter is haunting NASA (not Europe…). It is a victim of its own success, and it is therefore an agency without a mission as profoundly important as the one that got its astronauts to the Moon six times from 1969 to 1972. But there is a new mission, and it is far more important.

  NASA's seeds were planted at the imaginatively named First Annual Symposium on Space Travel, which was held at the Hayden Planetarium in New York in October 1951. The event's organizer was Wernher von Braun, the charismatic German aristocrat who masterminded the slave-labor program that made the rocket-propelled V-2 ballistic missiles—the “vengeance weapons”—that rained down on London and elsewhere in the closing stages of the Second World War. He and a little more than a hundred of his colleagues turned themselves and a veritable mountain of blueprints and other technical documents over to the US Army in the closing weeks of the war in an operation first called Overcast and then Paperclip. With the Soviet Union quickly looming as a menace, and the place of the ballistic missile in warfare clearly established, von Braun and six of his top echelon, together with the cache of documents, were spirited to the United States, where they were out of reach of Joseph Stalin's feared Red Army. Six of the “prisoners of peace” (as von Braun called them) were taken to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where they were put to work translating, evaluating, and cataloging the documents. Their leader was taken to Fort Bliss, Texas, as the advance man for the rest of the rocket team and eventually to the Army Ordnance Guided Missile Center at the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they designed constantly improved (and ever larger) ballistic missiles. It was at Redstone that von Braun created the gigantic Saturn V rocket that would get six Apollo crews on the Moon.

  But von Braun had long since metamorphosed from being a master rocketeer to being a handsome and personable visionary—a space savant—and a publicly recognized celebrity who believed that it was humankind's de
stiny to explore space and, as the saying of the time went, conquer it. He was to become the face of space for millions of Americans who emerged from the Second World War with a craving to extend their civilization to inhabiting the space around their planet and then extending it to the Moon and to Mars. Walt Disney understood that and capitalized on it by making Tomorrowland one of the four theme parks at Disneyland in California. (One of the others, Frontierland, featured Davy Crockett, who became another American television hero played by Fess Parker, and that had millions of kids wearing coonskin hats, complete with tails.) Typical of Disney's genius, he offered von Braun a consulting job on the project, and the visionary eagerly accepted it. Following that, von Braun took a consultant position on Disney's television show, called Disneyland, to work on the “Man in Space” episode, which aired on March 9, 1955, boasting that it was “science factual.”

  “If we were to start today on an organized, well supported space program, I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within ten years,” von Braun said on camera. “Now here is my design for a four-stage orbital rocket ship…” A second segment, “Man and the Moon,” which Disney Studios claimed was a “realistic and believable trip to the Moon in a rocket ship,” showed von Braun with an excellent prop in his shirt pocket: a slide rule.1 And he was as knowledgeable and prophetic as he was charismatic, of course, and therefore attracted a coterie of like-minded individuals who had science and engineering backgrounds and who enjoyed writing about it.

  They came together at the symposium on space flight, which was held at the Hayden Planetarium in 1951, which was sponsored by Collier's magazine. The magazine's editor, Gordon Manning, had come up with the idea. “Within the next 10 or 15 years, the earth can have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite which will be man's first foothold in space,” von Braun predicted in a reference to what would come to be called the International Space Station (ISS). “Inhabited by human beings, and visible from the ground as a sedately moving star, it will sweep around the earth at an incredible rate of speed in that dark void beyond the atmosphere which is known as ‘space.’…From this platform, a trip to the moon itself will be just a step, as scientists reckon distance in space.” (He was overly optimistic about the time frame, since the first section of the ISS was not carried to orbit until 1998, and it was not manned until late 2000.)2