[FPSPACE] NASA pressed to avert catastrophic Deep Impact

[Jens Kieffer-Olsen]

-----Original Message-----
From: LARRY KLAES [mailto:ljk4 at msn.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2007 3:51 PM

> NASA pressed to avert catastrophic Deep Impact
> 
> PhysOrg.com Nov. 8, 2007
> 
> *************************
> 
> NASA penny-pinching risks exposing
> humankind to a planetary catastrophe
> if a big enough asteroid evades
> detection and slams into Earth, US
> lawmakers warned...
> 
> http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=7464&m=25748

 To quote from the original article
 http://physorg.com/news113748841.html :

 "... the US space agency said the chances of a new "Near-Earth
 Object" (NEO) like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs were
 too remote to divert scarce resources."

 Which goes to show that the above-mentioned agency still
 exhibits a worrying failure to grasp the basics of the
 NEO threat.

 While an 'extinction class' impact is indeed remote, its
 consequences are awful. Maybe the agency is comforted by
 some shrewd considerations that government officials in
 Washington D.C. will have other priorities than punish
 them, should such an impact occur anyway.

 However, the essential characteristic of the NEO threat is
 that cumulative damage is almost evenly distibuted across
 the entire impactor diameter range, that is from 50m to 20km.
 That's a span of a factor 400 to the power of 3, that is
 64.000.000.

 So, how urgent is it to protect the US population against
 an impact 64 million times less powerful than the impact
 that wipes mankind off the face of the planet?  But which
 is also 64 million times more likely to happen. 

 Naturally said agency can assume that a smallish impact
 is statistically unlikely to hit the limited land mass
 occupied by their taxpayers. Rather it's presumably going
 to impact some other lot of humans on an entirely
 different continent. That attitude on the other hand gives
 other countries very good reasons to develop rocketry and
 weaponry to defend themselves. Whatever hardware can be
 used against an NEO, however, may also be used against
 a hostile NATO adversary.

--
Jens Kieffer-Olsen
Slagelse, Denmark