[FPSPACE] Looking for a vision

[E.P. Grondine]

Hello Jens - 

When I started reporting on the NEO hazard, both George Brown Jr. and Eugene Shoemaker were still alive. I never thought that some 12 years later senior NASA management would still be doing its best to avoid dealing with this hazard.

As you are undoubtedly aware, for its own internal reasons NASA has been relying on Morrison's estimate that asteroids are 95% of the threat, while comets are only 5%. I believe you and I both are fairly certain that these numbers are wrong, and that the ELEs are due to cometary impact, and have been occurring at a roughly regular rate of 1 per 26 million years. In other words, Clube and Napier were right on the injection mechanism and Morrison and Muller wrong. 

What that works out to hourly I don't know.

As far as mega-tsunami events go, and country killers, they seem to have been going on at a rate of 1 per 1,000 years recently. The Tunguska class region killers seem to have been occurring recently at a rate of 1 per 100 years. 

Whether these "smaller" impact rates are going to hold long term, going to get better, or going to get worse is not known right now. I don't know how much NASA is spending, if anything, to find out. Instead they spend considerable amounts trying to pretend that comets don't hit.

It is pretty clear that ground based facilities can't detect dead comet fragments, what are now being called "dark comets". Minimally we need to get some kind of dedicated wide field IR telescope built and into orbit.

Of course, the best solution is CAPS, and given that all of mankind's future is at stake, that strikes me as the way to go - with the best.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

PS - The US is going to try to get to clean energy, and the holes in the ozone are not entirely due to natural causes. Now as for Waziristan, Baluchistan, etc. I agree that perhaps we should leave that off fpspace as well.


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