Asteroid ace keeps NASA grounded

Rusty had said that this is an unusual case, because you do have this scenario where the movement of the course doesn’t have to be all that much. He said that in the case of a larger asteroid, you would have a bigger problem — and we don’t really have a good idea how to deal with that. Is that something you would subscribe to, that more needs to be done to deal with larger asteroids? Or if you had enough notice, could you make that small amount of motion and move the larger asteroids away?

If you have to move something a centimeter a second to move it an Earth diameter away in 10 years, it’s proportionately less if you have 20 years or 30 years, so it gets down to a few millimeters per second. The key is to discover these things early, and that’s exactly the goal of NASA’s search programs.

I’ve been warned, and warned, and warned again by NASA Headquarters not to sign NASA up for any mitigation responsibilities — because NASA does not have that responsibility at the moment. So I’m not to say anything on that.

What would have to happen to make those sorts of studies? Rusty has said that there should be an agency designated to protect Earth from near-Earth objects and address some of these mitigation measures — whether it’s a national or international agency, or set up under an international treaty. Is there a range of political scenarios for that?

What would have to happen, of course, is that the policy makers and Congress would have to direct NASA or the Department of Defense or someone to take responsibility for this, and then they would begin the studies necessary to come up with those options. As I mentioned, NASA does not have the charter to look at that, nor does anyone else. That’s the point — no one does at the moment.

The charter that NASA has is to identify those objects.

Identify and track. But not mitigate, and not deflect. They’re really sensitive about that.

But in the case of Apophis, there is some talk about a deflection scenario …

Right. Well, we did that analysis to directly respond to Rusty’s letter to [NASA Administrator] Mike Griffin. It was a pretty quick and dirty analysis, just using the fact that Deep Impact was so successful. We showed that this could be done more quickly than Rusty thought, so we don’t have to do anything now. We can wait until after 2013, when this is almost certainly going to go away. But even if it doesn’t, we still have options to deal with it. …

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