Dec05
It’s A Start
on December 5, 2008 at 6:42 amWe’re finally starting to take the asteroid threat seriously enough to start dedicating new telescopes to looking for them. A hundred million dollars seems like a pretty cheap insurance policy against another Tunguska or worse, in a populated area.
Unfortunately, we’re not developing the kind of spacefaring capability we need to do something about it if we see one coming. This is one kind of change that I’d be happy to see with the incoming administration. But it remains to be seen what space policy will come out of the process.
I would guess that roughly half (maybe more) of the really cool telescopes I have seen sold at Christmas time with digital connections to PC are sitting idle since their novelty wore off, say by the third of January. Could a SETI like program be constructed to put all that closet power to work?
I would imagine not, unless you could somehow move all of those telescopes out of their urban or semi-urban environments and increase their individual sizes by a factor of 10 or so, each.
Home telescopes may be getting more sophisticated, but they’re still limited by their surrounding environment. I’m pretty sure that, even with a distributed calculation and observation, they would be all but useless for finding and tracking small, dark objects such as asteroids.
But I could be wrong, too.
Pan STARRS is a great system for many tasks, not just for discovering NEOs (although that is a major part of its justification.) The full system, for example, will be able to determine if the solar system has any planets for great distances beyond Pluto (Jupiter-sized planets would be detected out to 2000 AU).
As we have effectively zero ability to do anything about whatever this happens to turn up currently, I’d say not so much insurance as going full on Chicken Little, which is a good thing if it helps us achieve a space-faring society.