NASA won't launch a mission to hunt deadly asteroids
Source: Quartz
NASA won’t launch a mission to hunt deadly asteroids
By Tim Fernholz July 5, 2019
NASA says it can’t afford to build a space telescope considered the fastest way to identify asteroids that might impact the Earth with terrible consequences.
A 2015 law gave the space agency five years to identify 90% of near-Earth objects larger than 140 meters in diameter, which could devastate cities, regions and even civilization itself if they were to impact the planet. NASA isn’t going to meet that deadline, and scientists believe they have so far only identified about a third of the asteroids considered a threat.
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led by principal investigator Amy Mainzer, developed a proposal for a space telescope called NEOCam that would use infrared sensors to find and measure near-Earth objects. The National Academy of Sciences issued a report this spring concluding that NEOCam was the fastest way to meet the asteroid-hunting mandate. But NASA will not approve the project to begin development.
“The Planetary Defense Program at NASA does not currently have sufficient funding to approve development of a full space-based NEO survey mission as was proposed by the NEOCam project,” a NASA spokesperson told Quartz this week.
The agency said it was prioritizing funding for ground-based telescopes looking for asteroids, though the NAS report concluded that they would not fulfill its mandate. The agency is also funding the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission (DART), which will pilot the technologies needed to do something about any threatening near-Earth objects. Still, the agency said the infrared telescope proposed for NEOCam “could be ready for any future flight mission development effort.”
-snip-
Read more: https://qz.com/1659566/nasa-nixes-hunt-for-deadly-asteroids/
= new reply since forum marked as read
