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NASA says it can not afford to build a space telescope that is considered the fastest way to identify asteroids that could have terrible consequences for the Earth.
A 2015 law gave the space agency five years to identify 90% of objects near the Earth of a diameter greater than 140 meters, which could devastate cities, regions and even the civilization itself. they had to touch the planet. NASA will not meet this deadline and scientists believe that they have so far identified only about one-third of the asteroids considered a threat.
Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led by lead investigator Amy Mainzer, have developed a space telescope proposal called NEOCam, which would use infrared sensors to search for and measure near-Earth objects. The National Academy of Sciences released a report this spring concluding that NEOCam was the fastest way to meet the asteroid hunting mandate. But NASA will not approve the project to start development.
"NASA's planetary defense program currently does not have sufficient funds to approve the development of a full NEO space mission study as proposed by the NEOCam project," said a spokesman. NASA Quartz this week.
The agency said it prioritized the funding of ground-based telescopes searching for asteroids, although the NAS report concluded that they would not fulfill its mandate. The agency is also funding the Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission (DART), which will drive the technologies needed to fight near-Earth objects. The agency said, however, that the proposed infrared telescope for NEOCam "could be ready for any future flight mission development effort."
Scientists say NEOCam is caught in a "cosmic chicken" game between Congress and NASA. NASA officials are reluctant to prioritize global defense over scientific missions, while Congress has yet to provide specific funding for an asteroid survey. The SIN report recommended that "missions meeting high priority global defense objectives should not be forced to compete with missions that meet high-priority scientific objectives."
"Although highly improbable, to be taken by surprise by a catastrophic asteroid impact that could have been detected would be an epic failure of the history of science," Quartz, the science specialist at the US, said. MIT's planet, Richard Binzel. "We are now able to know what's going on, which means we have no excuse for a continuing lack of knowledge."
Binzel says it's now incumbent on Congress to increase NASA's funding for global defense by $ 40 million a year, which would allow the agency to develop the spaceship and the launch in the coming years.
NASA, however, has not asked for this more in the White House budget proposal to Congress this year. Instead, the agency has requested new funding of $ 1.6 billion to support a human comeback on the moon that could cost up to $ 30 billion over the next five years. On the other hand, the total cost of the NEOCam mission is estimated at between $ 500 and $ 600 million. But NASA funding is not a priority in Washington, because Congress has not yet approved the broad lines of funding for 2020.
Legislators have not been enthusiastic about funding lunar return, but asteroid hunting may be easier to sell. A May national survey of Americans found that 68% of the missions supported were aimed at finding asteroids that could impact the Earth, while only 23% thought a return to the moon would be a good idea .
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