Experts say U.S. must do more about asteroids

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35013963/ns/technology_and_science-space/

updated 2:25 a.m. ET, Sat., Jan. 23, 2010

The United States must do more to safeguard Earth against destruction by an asteroid than merely prepping nuclear missiles, a new report has found.

The 134-page report, released Friday by the National Academy of Sciences, states that the $4 million spent by the United States annually to identify all potentially dangerous asteroids near Earth is not enough to do the job mandated by Congress in 2005.

NASA is in dire need of more funding to meet the challenge, and less than $1 million is currently set aside to research ways to counter space rocks that do endanger the Earth — measures like developing the spacecraft and technology to deflect incoming asteroids — the report states.

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The final report, written by a committee of expert scientists, says NASA is ill-equipped to catalog 90 percent of the nearby asteroids that are 460 feet (140 meters) across or larger, as directed by Congress.

The United States should also be planning more methods of defending Earth against an asteroid threat in the near-term. Nuclear weapons should be a last resort — but they're also only useful if the world has years of advance notice of a large, incoming space rock, the report states.

Likewise, decades of notice are required to build and launch spacecraft to push an asteroid clear of Earth or smash it with a forceful but non-nuclear, projectile, the committee wrote in the report. Organized evacuations and other civil defense efforts would only be useful in the event a smaller threatening object is found with limited advance notice, it added.

NASA's asteroid and near-Earth object experts say the agency has found about 85 percent of the largest nearby asteroids, ones that are a half-mile (1 kilometer) wide or larger. But only 15 percent of the 460-foot-wide asteroids near Earth have been discovered and tracked to date, and just 5 percent of nearby space rocks about 164 feet (50 meters) across have been found.

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Still, "this presents the classic problem of the conflict between extremely important and extremely rare," the report stated. "The committee considers work on this problem as insurance, with the premiums devoted wholly towards preventing the tragedy."

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