Oncoming Asteroid to Hit Mars a Possibility in January of 2008
On November 9, 2007, Wired Science put out a report entitled, “Congress: NASA Killer Asteroid Report Ignores Risk” by Loretta Whitesides, which referred to NASA ignoring the risk of a “large rock slamming into earth.” With an unfunded 2005 mandate telling them to do quite the opposite, NASA still refused to maintain responsibility for ensuring the safety of Earth from oncoming asteroids. “As the head of Program Analysis and Evaluation Scott Pace put it, we can’t do more to detect Near Earth Objects “given the constrained resources and the strategic objectives NASA already has been tasked with.” Still, it seems somebody ought to do it…”
Problems upon problems seemed to trouble the report that NASA had supplied to Congress, according to Apollo Astronaut Rusty Schweickart and his follow-up detailed technical review of the flaws of the NASA submitted report and its analysis. But according to NASA, they maintained they were doing all they could to protect Earth and its inhabitants from any danger from oncoming asteroids, as they will simply provide a “nuclear blast” which would provide more than enough protection. That is all fine and wonderful, but according to Schweickart, there are still areas of dangerous keyholes that will bring harm–regions of space that would take this nuclear blast and bring the asteroid further back to hit Earth. He maintained that the types of objects that were analyzed in the NASA report “skewed the results” toward a nuclear solution, such as using nuclear blast to justify the use of nuclear power, using at specific targets that would come to the conclusion that a non-nuclear slow push solution would work in 97% of the situations. Where this is leading to is the latest report put out by NASA stating that an oncoming asteroid has one in 75 chance of hitting the red planet, a planet that we are all planning on living on some time in the near future–YET we ae still spending billions of dollars for a place to stay. Pretty thrilling, hey? Something just does not make a whole lot of sense here. We refuse to spend money for further protection from oncoming asteroids, and put out questionable reports about our qualifications for this protection–yet spend billions of dollars for human colonization on a planet which we are saying will receive a direct hit by an asteroid by January 30.
Now, this is not heading to Earth but it still brings up the issue of asteroids that NASA says it has “perfectly under control” when it approaches the planet Earth. The US space agency’s Near Earth Object Program, or NEOP, has admitted the exact course of the asteroid is difficult to predict but a date of January 30 has been set. We shall see. So far, my bet is on former astronaut Rusty Schweickart and his opinion of the space agency’s determination regarding asteroids, not NASA. The B612 Foundation which was established by Rusty Schweickart, which is to inform the public and interested citizens about asteroid danger, and how to better protect ourself.
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 1:37 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
