Latest news with #NEO)Surveyor
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
US Representatives worry Trump's NASA budget plan will make it harder to track dangerous asteroids
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. On Thursday (May 15), the U.S. House Committee on Space, Science and Technology convened with scientists to discuss a rather exciting topic: What can NASA do if we identify a dangerous asteroid on a collision course with Earth? It was an especially prudent subject given all the recent fuss about asteroid 2024 YR4, which had a notable chance of hitting our planet before scientists refined its position and deemed it harmless. Most of Thursday's conversation surrounded the agency's highly anticipated Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, which should greatly improve hazardous asteroid detection capabilities as a whole. However, there were also many efforts to address the elephant in the room: the Trump administration's recently announced intention to slash NASA's top-line funding by 24% for the upcoming fiscal year. The proposed cut to the agency's science programs — which includes its planetary defense work — is even deeper, at 47%. Outlined in the White House's "skinny budget proposal," as it's called, the top-line reduction would be the "largest single-year cut to NASA in American history." "If enacted, the Trump administration's skinny budget proposal risks putting NASA on a path to irrelevance," Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-North Carolina) said during the hearing. "It threatens our economic and national security, surrenders U.S. leadership and space to our adversaries, and jeopardizes our competitiveness and standing on the world stage. That's a strategic posture I simply cannot accept." The NEO Surveyor mission is the first space telescope that'll be dedicated to locating asteroids that could threaten Earth, NASA says. It's the agency's next big step in upping the nation's planetary defense game, which was really brought to the forefront for the public in 2022 with the DART mission. DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, sent a spacecraft to smash into an asteroid called Dimorpohos. Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid, called Didymos. Neither threatened us, to be clear, as this was just a proof-of-concept mission. The goal was to see whether this impact would adjust Dimorphos' trajectory around Didymos; if so, it would suggest that a spacecraft can one day be sent to an actually threatening asteroid to knock it off a potential collision course with Earth. DART worked beautifully, but it could use a little help. NEO Surveyor is more of a prophylactic measure for planetary defense. It'll be the thing that spots the asteroid we may want to smash a future DART craft into. "We do not know of any sizable object that has a significant risk of impacting Earth in the next 100 years — however, there are a lot more to be found," Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during the hearing. "The mission will improve NASA's ability to discover and then define the sizes and the orbits of the NEOs to understand the hazard they actually pose to us," she added. "Finding those potentially hazardous asteroids remains a top priority for NASA's planetary defense program." One of the most promising aspects of NEO Surveyor is the fact that it'll be able to pinpoint NEOs by way of infrared detection. Infrared wavelengths aren't visible to human eyes and most human technology; they're usually thought of as heat signatures. Firefighters, for instance, can use infrared wavelengths to understand fire distribution in a burning building. This detection strategy should yield a higher target hit rate when compared to traditional methods, which are usually based on whether sunlight reflects off an NEO. In fact, an issue with relying purely on sunlight for NEO hunting was illustrated with the Chelyabinsk asteroid that exploded over Russia in 2013, which damaged many buildings and injured over 1,000 people. "The blast released energy equivalent to about 440 kilotons of TNT, more than 30 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb, shattering windows, injuring thousands and causing millions of dollars in property damage in Russia. Because the asteroid approached from the direction of the sun, it was undetectable by ground-based telescopes and went untracked," Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), who currently serves as the chairman of the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, said during the hearing. Though NEO Surveyor still won't be able to detect a possibly hazardous asteroid coming straight from the direction of the sun, it'll enable observations of NEOs super-close to our star, Fox said. "It'll help us find the objects, including the dark fraction of the population, which we think is sort of roughly 35 to 40% or so of the population," Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for the NEO Surveyor mission and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said during the hearing. "It will also help us measure the sizes, because we can quickly convert the infrared fluxes into a diameter as soon as we get an orbit from the Minor Planet Center … That's such an important component to the impact energy." "We track the orbits of all 38,000 currently known NEOs, including the more than two and a half thousand potentially hazardous ones, and an impact by any one of those would be devastating," Matthew Payne, director of the Minor Planet Center, said during the hearing. Fox said that NEO Surveyor should be ready to launch by 2028, perhaps sooner, but that is of course assuming the mission gets the funding it needs. "Passback documents" — a sort of preview of the White House's 2026 budget request— suggested that the proposed cuts could lead to the closure of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The prospect of shutting down such a key agency research facility worries scientists, and it came up during the hearing. Fox was asked, theoretically, what would happen if NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, which plays a vital role in planetary defense, were to be shut down. "If [NASA Ames] were no longer able to do the the the assessment, what we would lose is really the ability to give our sort of early expert advice to [the Federal Emergency Management Agency], which is then responsible for deciding where the perimeter is and what the response is to protect as much human life as possible," Fox said. Payne said that, at present, the Minor Planet Center hasn't been affected by the proposed cuts; Mainzer said she's uncertain how the cuts might affect NEO Surveyor's operations. She also emphasized how expensive it can be to train scientists like herself to lead such an important mission. "We really do have to have the investment and the time that it takes to learn the science, to be able to do it well," Mainzer said. Fox echoed the uncertainty, responding to nearly all questions concerning Trump's skinny budget with the answer that she needs to see the finalized budget before coming to conclusions. "We await the full president's budget so we can see the priorities in the direction on which missions may be supported or not supported," she said. "It's clear that planetary defense leverages many of our federal [science and technology] agencies. Now, whether that federal agency continues — whether that expertise continues — I think, is now in question," Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) said during the hearing. Other Trump-instigated orders, like widespread layoffs of probationary employees and deferred resignation programs, are creating a "brain drain," she added. Recent executive orders, for instance, have seen the rapid federal layoffs of over 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who monitor natural disasters such as hurricanes and forecast daily weather patterns. The deferred resignation program is a sort of roundabout way of laying off employees, offering them payment through a certain month if they leave of their own accord. "A very reasonable question is whether NASA should, in fact, be spending more money on asteroid monitoring and defense given the catastrophic risk to our country and civilization," Rep. George Whitesides (D-California), who used to work at NASA in a leadership position, said during the hearing. "As several members have mentioned already, our leadership in this area, like so many areas of space and Earth science, are under threat now from the proposed cuts to NASA's budget, as well as the budgets of other science agencies." "We're talking about impacts that can actually wipe out an entire region, lay waste to a country or devastate the planet. And, you know, this is something that we can do something about. Actually, this is a natural disaster that is 100% preventable if we do our homework," Payne said. Related Stories: — Reshaping our return to the moon: Trump's 2026 budget gives Artemis a major facelift — Trump's 2026 budget plan would cancel NASA's Mars Sample Return mission. Experts say that's a 'major step back' — Trump administration cancels lease for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies lab in New York City Of note, Rep. Foushee asked both Payne and Mainzer how much NEO tracking could improve if artificial intelligence could be implemented in the workflow. Both agreed that training systems with AI would lead to more accurate and more rapid results, but when Foushee inquired how much funding would be necessary to realistically perform such AI implementation, the question was deferred to Fox. "Adequate funding is certainly a major thing," Fox said. Exactly how our planetary defense strategies may be affected hinges on the details of Trump's budget, which have not yet been released. (And Congress still has to enact a budget, which remains a proposal until that happens.) If the White House indeed cuts back on funding for these efforts, Fox said NASA may be able to rely on global partners for hazardous NEO tracking. "If we can't all unite on a large chunk hurtling towards the planet, what are we going to unite on?" Fox said.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Earth 1, asteroids 0: The next generation of planetary defense takes shape at JPL
There is a non-zero chance that somewhere in the nearby solar system is a rock that might kill us all. This stony assassin may well be orbiting the sun at this very moment, careening down a celestial path that could, one day, intersect with ours. And if that rock is big enough and hits in the right place — boom. Fire and smoke and death and extinction. Homo sapiens goes the way of T. rex. To save ourselves from a killer asteroid, first we have to find it. A spacecraft now under construction at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory may be our best hope. The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is a $1.4-billion infrared telescope with a single mission: to hunt asteroids and comets that could pose a danger to Earth. Astronomers have already identified roughly 2,500 asteroids larger than 140 meters that could come worryingly close. Statistical models suggest that there could be as many as 25,000 such objects in the solar system, in addition to countless smaller asteroids that could also do considerable damage, said Amy Mainzer, a UCLA professor of planetary science who is leading the NEO Surveyor mission for NASA. 'We still don't know everything that's in our own backyard,' Mainzer said. And if we do need to mount a defense against an incoming threat from space, she said, 'it all starts with knowing that there's something there and having enough time to really make an informed plan.' Asteroids are essentially construction debris left over from the formation of the solar system. A collapsed cloud of gas and dust condensed in places to create planets, including the one we're on right now. It also produced smaller rocks that never achieved planet size or status. The NEO Surveyor fulfills a 2005 act of Congress ordering NASA to catalog 90% of near-Earth objects larger than 459 feet (140 meters), which is roughly the size at which an asteroid could take out a city, or 'vaporize the L.A. basin,' said Tom Hoffman, JPL's project manager for the mission. Within the first five years after its planned Sept. 13, 2027, launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the mission is tasked with identifying at least two-thirds of the estimated 25,000 asteroids larger than that size believed to be circling Earth. Within its first decade, astronomers expect to have tracked at least 90%, Mainzer said. Most of what we know about the asteroids in our celestial neighborhood comes from ground-based telescopes. When viewed here on Earth, the most elusive asteroids look like ink spots traveling through a dark sky, Hoffman said. But those dark objects absorb enough energy from the sun to raise their temperature. Through an infrared telescope, they glow like red Christmas lights. The telescope's destination is the first Lagrange point, or L1, one of five known places in the solar system where the balanced gravitational forces of the sun and Earth tend to hold objects in place. From a fixed distance of roughly 1 million miles above Earth — five times the distance from here to the moon — it will follow our planet around the sun, taking in an exponentially broader view of the field around Earth's orbit than existing telescopes do. The more images it captures of a potentially hazardous object, the more accurately astronomers can plot the object's future movements and calculate the risk. The most famous collision between Earth and one of these objects took place 66 million years ago, when a rock 7.5 miles wide smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula. The impact incinerated everything in the vicinity, and sparked massive fires. Toxic clouds of pulverized rock, sulfate aerosols and wildfire soot soon blanketed the planet, blocking all but a tiny fraction of the sun's energy and bringing photosynthesis to a virtual halt for the only known time in history. Much smaller rocks can still wreak havoc. In 2013, an asteroid approximately 60 feet in diameter entered the atmosphere near the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. It exploded before hitting the ground — a common fate for smaller asteroids that can't withstand the compression of entry — and shattered enough windows to send roughly 1,600 people to the hospital with minor injuries. 'Anything bigger than that — it's not just going to be broken glass,' Mainzer said. Real-life asteroids don't come hurtling toward Earth from the outer reaches of space the way they do in the movies. They tend to orbit elliptical paths around the sun, passing within sight of our telescopes years, decades or even centuries before any potential collision. Technology has, fortunately, come a long way since the late Cretaceous. The sooner we find these asteroids, the more time we have to figure out the right way to prevent a catastrophe, and the less work it takes to successfully pull that off. 'It all comes down to doing things as early as you can, because then you barely have to do anything,' said Kathryn Kumamoto, head of the planetary defense program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 'If we did want to, say, deflect the asteroid, we only have to nudge it a very little bit if we can get to it very far in advance,' Kumamoto said. 'A change of a millimeter per second over decades will add up to thousands of kilometers, and that can be enough to make the asteroid miss the Earth entirely.' NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, confirmed in 2022 that it's possible to successfully change the trajectory of a near-Earth object when it deliberately crashed a spacecraft into a tiny asteroid 7 million miles away. But brute force isn't our only option. Other proposals include painting part of the object with a light-colored coating that would redistribute its heat and eventually change its spin and orbit, Mainzer said, or parking a large spacecraft nearby whose gravity would reshape the object's trajectory. 'It all starts with knowing that there's something there and having enough time to really make an informed plan,' Mainzer said. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA Awards SpaceX $100 Million Contract To Launch Asteroid Hunting Telescope
Remember just last week when we were all excitedly reading about the record one in 32 chance that a giant asteroid was on a collision course with Earth? Well, it isn't anymore but that doesn't mean there aren't more massive space rocks up there that could smash into the planet without much notice. To prepare for this, NASA awarded SpaceX a $100 million contract to launch a new satellite that could monitor extraterrestrial threats to the Earth. NASA began developing a special telescope that can scan the night sky for asteroids almost five years ago. The craft, called the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor, comprises an infrared telescope that will search space for potentially threatening asteroids, reports Production of the specially-designed satellite kicked off in January 2023 and NASA is now preparing to set out a plan to launch the Surveyor into space to start work protecting the planet. The task of transporting the craft into orbit will now fall on Elon Musk-backed SpaceX, as reports: The agency announced on Friday (Feb. 21) that it has selected Elon Musk's company to launch its NEO Surveyor spacecraft, which will hunt for asteroids and comets that could pose a threat to Earth. NEO Surveyor will lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Space Coast no earlier than September 2027. The total value of the newly announced firm, fixed-price contract is about $100 million, which covers the launch and related services, NASA officials said. SpaceX will transport the Surveyor to a point about 930,000 miles away from Earth. From there, it will scan space using telescopes that can pick up two infrared wavelengths to spot threatening asteroids. Read more: Even SpaceX Would Apparently Rather Use A Ford F-150 Lightning Than Tesla Cybertruck NASA awarded the $100 million contract to SpaceX to cover the launch of the craft, but not its construction or operation. The costs of designing, developing and assembling the probe fall on NASA, which is already knee-deep in the production of the new telescope. SpaceX will just be tasked with getting the probe to its destination onboard one of the company's Falcon 9 rockets. The rocket will launch "no earlier" than September 2027, reports NASA and there isn't yet a timeline on how long it will take for the probe to begin scanning for threats once it's in space. Musk's private space company regularly works with NASA, providing rockets to launch all kinds of tech into orbit when the American space agency requires. NASA previously called on SpaceX to run supply missions to the International Space Station and the company could even be tasked with transporting a new lunar rover to the surface of the moon one day. Once deployed to a site that scientists call the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1, NEO Surveyor will form part of our planetary defense system to scan for asteroids that are at least 460 feet across, explains. The program launched in 2021, but its importance was highlighted over the past few weeks when the world watched to see if a city-killing asteroid would hit Earth. The new probe aims to give advanced warnings of similarly enormous space rocks, and will also help scientists map the paths of such asteroids to see if they could hit our home. The program remains an important one, despite it emerging that the near-Earth object, designated 2024 YR4, probably won't hit Earth in 2032 after all, reports Ars Technica. To hunt out future risks to our planet, the NEO Surveyor will work alongside probes like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will also launch in 2027, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is currently under construction in Chile. Now, NASA will just have to hope that the team responsible for delivering the NEO Surveyor isn't gutted as part of Musk's never-ending cuts to the U.S. Government. At least the fact that SpaceX will make $100 million off the back of the project should mean that it's safe for now. Read the original article on Jalopnik.
