Incoming? $40 million to track asteroids

Alicia Robinson

As if having triplets and serving in a Congress facing the highest

trade deficit in U.S. history weren’t enough to worry about, Costa

Mesa Rep. Dana Rohrabacher also has concerns about objects in outer

space.

He’s long been a proponent of commercial space exploration and

chaired a House subcommittee on space and aeronautics for years.

Hoping to assuage fears about an asteroid hitting our planet,

Rohrabacher in March introduced a bill that would provide NASA with

$40 million during 2006 and 2007 to track and catalog near-Earth

objects.

“We need to make sure that we are surveying not only the huge

objects in space that are coming toward us and that would totally

destroy the Earth, but also those objects that are coming toward us

that would have a catastrophic impact,” Rohrabacher said.

The last time an object crashed down that would have destroyed

cities, had any been there, was in 1908 near the Stony Tunguska River

in Siberia, said Virginia Trimble, a physics and astronomy professor

at UC Irvine.

Those types of events are rare, but smaller space objects pose a

threat that’s hard to gauge, she said.

“Asteroids that are 100 miles across, all of those are known,”

Trimble said. “When you get down to 10 miles across, only some of

those are known, and when you get down to one mile across, the

surveys are very incomplete.”

So not only is there very little data on smaller objects, but

their orbits aren’t always stable. The danger may not be known until

just weeks before an object is heading toward Earth, Trimble said.

While people have gone for thousands of years without knowing

whether anything was flying at them from space, that ignorance is not

bliss to Rohrabacher, who said his bill has gotten a good response

from colleagues so far.

“I think that it is almost criminal not to think of something

simply because it is unlikely,” the congressman said. “This

legislation is aimed at trying to spur people to come up with not

only the proper cataloging but how do we deal with it.”

How to address a giant -- or even mid-sized -- ball of space rock

hurtling toward the planet is a dicey issue among scientists.

You could shoot it with nuclear weapons, but that means the planet

would be hit with a lot of smaller objects rather than one large one,

Trimble said. Another plan is to send something up to the object that

heats up one side of it, creating a plume-like rocket exhaust that

would shift the object’s orbit.

And while the duck-and-cover method won’t work, people can always

run from a smaller incoming object.

“If it’s something that you catch [within] days or weeks because

it’s small, then it’s like having a good earthquake or a good tsunami

warning,” Trimble said. “You tell people to get the hell out of the

way.”