"Astronauts warn UN of threat to Earth from asteroids"

[BronyPony 575]

 

Members of the United Nations met with distinguished astronauts and cosmonauts this week in New York to begin implementing the first-ever international contingency plan for defending Earth against catastrophic asteroid strikes.

Six of the space travelers involved in these U.N. discussions discussed the asteroid defense effort Friday in a news conference hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at the American Museum of Natural History. Their goal: to drive home the very-real threats posed by near-Earth objects (NEOs), or asteroids traveling within the radius of Earth's orbit with the sun. You can see a video of the asteroid defense discussion here.

Scientists estimate that there are roughly 1 million near-Earth asteroids that could potentially pose a threat to the planet, but only a small fraction of these have actually been detected by telescopes. There are about 100 times more asteroids lurking in space than have ever been located, said Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and co-founder of the non-profit B612 Foundation advocating asteroid defense strategies. "Our challenge is to find these asteroids first, before they find us," Lu said. [Photos: Potentially Dangerous Asteroids Up Close]

 

'This decision of what to do, how to do it and what systems to use has to be coordinated internationally.'

- Former NASA astronaut and B612 co-founder Russell Schweickart

 

To help achieve this goal, Lu co-founded an organization called the B612 Foundation in 2002. Today, the group is developing a privately built infrared space telescope — called the Sentinel Space Telescope — with the sole purpose of locating threatening asteroids. The foundation hopes to launch the telescope by 2018.

The Sentinel telescope will help space agencies identify threatening near-Earth objects years before they hit Earth, providing governments and space agencies with enough time to take action, Lu and his colleagues said. Such action would entail deploying a spacecraft — or multiple spacecrafts, depending on the size of the space rock — toward the asteroid in order to smack it off course.

The technology and funds to deflect an asteroid in this way already exist, the panel explained, but the Association of Space Explorers, a group that includes active and retired astronauts, decided to involve the United Nations in their decision-making efforts to avoid nationally biased action in the event of an emergency.

"The question is, which way do you move [the asteroid]?" former NASA astronaut and B612 co-founder Russell Schweickart said in the news conference. "If something goes wrong in the middle of the deflection, you have now caused havoc in some other nation that was not at risk. And, therefore, this decision of what to do, how to do it and what systems to use has to be coordinated internationally. That's why we took this to the United Nations."

The panel hopes that the discussions with the United Nations this week —which extend from discussions dating back to 2008, when the panel presented the United Nations with the first draft of a report titled "Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response" —will improve public awareness of the threats at hand, and encourage policymakers to develop plans and appoint leaders to deal with threats in a timely manner.

The explosion of a truck-size asteroid over Chelyabinsk, Russia, this past February —which blew out windows throughout the entire city and injured more than 1,000 people —helped draw public attention to what the panelists described as the often-overlooked and underappreciated threat to the planet.

"It did make a difference in policymakers realizing that this is not just a science-fiction concept, or something that will happen in 100 or 500 years in the future," Thomas Jones, former NASA astronaut and senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, told SPACE.com at the news conference. "The fact that it happened right now, I think, enforced the reality."

The recommendations that the group presented to the United Nations this week provide an outline of what governments will ultimately implement in the event of an emergency. However, the details of these recommendations are still in the works, Schweickart said.

Finally, the government is actually taking Space very seriously. It is about time. I mean seriously, the government needed to did this a long time before we even began going into space. What does everyone think?

[Galen 1,354]

I think this ought to set the standard for space exploration. Defending the planet, whether it's terms of protecting wildlife and caring for the health of the planet's environment and the people living on it, all the way to asteroid threats, should be something that the entire world should take interest in regardless of culture and nationality. Indeed, it shouldn't have taken humanity as a whole to reach this stage, and would've been possible to reach it sooner had there not been such fixation on earthly goals and concerns.

Edited October 29, 2013 by ~Chaotic Freedan~

[Oblivion 20,282]

WELP, we are still alive right now soooooooo. YEET!

[Splashee 28,596]

UN, please save us!!

 

Spoiler

 Why UN?

 

[Lucky Bolt 35,226]

There's always a risk of asteroids hitting Earth. 

[Splashee 28,596]

1 hour ago, Lucky Bolt said:

There's always a risk of asteroids hitting Earth. 

Somehow, the biggest risks for asteroid collisions are: Paris and New York City.
Watch out if you live there!

Spoiler

Every 100 years or so, a big one hits somewhere. Russia is a big country and gets some really scary stuff, usually out in nowhere.
When I say big one, I mean a really small one, but it is scary!

 

I do not want to talk about the ones that are large. Yep, not gonna think about that!

 

[Phosphor 11,538]

I wouldn't worry about it. The space junk orbiting this planet will save us from asteroids.  

[Stone Cold Steve Jobs 22,504]

When spotted, we can usually plot an asteroid’s orbit and trajectory many years in advance. The real dangers are comets. Comets don’t reflect all that much light until they get very close to the inner solar system, so if a comet were to post a danger of striking us, we may only get a few weeks to a few months notice.

[Splashee 28,596]

On 1/17/2020 at 1:29 PM, Stone Cold Steve Tuna said:

When spotted, we can usually plot an asteroid’s orbit and trajectory many years in advance. The real dangers are comets. Comets don’t reflect all that much light until they get very close to the inner solar system, so if a comet were to post a danger of striking us, we may only get a few weeks to a few months notice.

And then there is that school bus shaped thing you showed me! What was the name of that thing again? Wouldn't want that to crash into Earth, would we?

[Stone Cold Steve Jobs 22,504]

2 hours ago, Super Splashee said:

And then there is that school bus shaped thing you showed me! What was the name of that thing again? Wouldn't want that to crash into Earth, would we?

That was Oumuamua good sir! It’s an interstellar asteroid between 100 and 1000 meters long currently on escape trajectory from the solar system. Had it hit the Earth it could have probably caused substantial damage, but I am not 100% on how bad the damage could be.

thankfully, it’s well on it’s way out of the solar system to parts unknown. So this particular boogeyman is harmless to us!