How do these huge asteroids stop surprising us?

We are off the beaten track, but some interesting scientific articles in the news raise questions. The first news is that on July 24, an asteroid (named 2019OK) larger than a football pitch has grown 40,400 kilometers from Earth. It's less than a fifth of the distance from Earth to the Moon. In astronomical terms, it's a very big loss. If that had struck us, it would not have been an extinction event comparable to that of the dinosaurs, but it would have done a lot of damage, whatever their origin.

The second part of this story is perhaps more alarming. Although NASA spent years looking for all the dangerous asteroids in Earth's orbit, no one saw it coming 24 hours before it arrived. Even if we had a grandiose (and still fictitious) plan in place to hijack the killer asteroids, we would never have been able to put on our shoes before we set the world on fire. This made Buzzfeed wonder how these giant rocks stop sneaking. A FOIA request to NASA resulted in some of the substantive conversations taking place at the agency.

"This object has slipped through a whole series of our capture nets," writes two days after the July 25 flyby, Paul Chodas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, describing what he called sneaky rock. "I wonder how often this situation has occurred without the asteroid being discovered."

The emails were obtained in response to a request from the Freedom of Information Act and gave a detailed behind-the-scenes look at NASA as NASA officials sought to understand why the asteroid had not been spotted up to whistle. beyond the Earth. Other e-mails show in-house agency scientists frustrated by a media response describing this event as a "city killer" who "misses out on the Earth".

"This one has taught us to sneak in and it's an interesting story about the limitations of our current polling network," Johnson wrote in an email on July 26th.

Although it's easy to point fingers, we probably should not be so quick to blame NASA. One of my favorite radio hosts, Micah Hanks, believes that blaming NASA for this fault is a short-term vision. In fact, it's amazing that we find and follow as much of these rocks as they are.

What makes these "near misses" so disturbing is that we see them at all. As our asteroid detection capabilities continue to improve, we are actually seeing a better rate of success in detecting these objects when it may never have been seen before.

The really sobering idea is to think about how many times in the past there were larger objects – or closer ones – that were spinning beyond the Earth without us really having an idea …

It's easy to see why people would be worried about the news of a "near miss" like what happened with 2019 OK. However, rather than a failure of NASA and other space agencies around the world, it is a clear indication that our science of planetary defense is constantly improving.

I find myself landing somewhere between these two streams of thought. Like Micah, I think NASA is doing its best with what it has. And over time, we're probably going to be even better at detecting and intercepting. But that does not mean there is no room for improvement. Or "blame" if you wish.

In 2005, Congress passed a law ordering NASA to begin tracking the majority of dangerous asteroids passing near us. And they have made remarkable progress since then. But as Buzzfeed rightly points out, NASA has requested (and needs) larger and more sophisticated telescopes and spacecraft to carry out its mission. Congress has failed to secure the necessary funding for these resources.

So, if there is a fault to be rejected here, we should probably be targeting Congress. They turned the search for near-Earth asteroids into an at least partially unfunded mandate. They can probably do a much better job but they will need more than two dixie cups tied with a string. At the same time, we may all need to adjust our expectations and stay grounded in reality. While this may be painful, I come back to a sobering quote from Micah in the article cited above. "In the final sense, a space object large enough to cause widespread damage will hit the Earth – it's not a question of ifbut just one of the when. "