[ad_1]
By Paul Voosen
NASA plans to launch an infrared telescope capable of detecting asteroids during a collision with the Earth. It could be launched by the middle of the next decade, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's deputy administrator for science in Washington, DC, at a meeting of the agency's advisory board today.
The telescope, which will cost between $ 500 million and $ 600 million, comes from the very long shots of the Near Earth Camera (NEOCam), first proposed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California. California, almost 15 years ago. Such an objective is essential to meet a congressional requirement that NASA detect 90% of all potentially hazardous asteroids and comets by at least 140 meters in diameter by the end of 2020. The telescope will likely be assign another name. The same is true, says Mark Sykes, CEO of the Tucson Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, and a member of the NEOCam science team. "There is no independent or new spacecraft or operational design here. This mission is NEOCam. "
Although NASA is not meeting the deadline set by the Congress, which has not been funded by any funding, the combination of an infrared telescope and the Large Synoptic Telescope, a ground facility under construction in Chile, will eventually make it a reality, confirm the national academies. Science, Engineering and Medicine in Washington, DC, said this summer in a report. The researchers state that a telescope operating in the infrared spectrum is essential because the last decade has shown that black asteroids, which are almost invisible in visible light but are distinguishable in the infrared, are more abundant than ever. We did not think so. "There are many very dark asteroids," says Jay Melosh, scientist in planetary science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and author of the report. "This reinforces the need for the infrared system."
The construction of the infrared telescope may, however, require an increase in NASA's annual $ 150 million budget for global defense. Most of this money now goes to the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission built by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. DART, which is scheduled for launch in 2021, is investigating whether it is possible to deflect the trajectory of an asteroid. It is unclear whether Congress members will follow NASA's initiative and also fund the new infrared telescope.
The mission also marks perhaps the first time NASA has accepted a mission proposal developed by an outside group for one of its competitive science programs and proposes running it internally, says Sykes. This decision could embody the role of Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who has led NEOCam since its creation, as well as its scientific team. Mainzer, who has just moved from JPL to the lunar and global laboratory of the university, was reportedly the main investigator of the mission.
"J & # 39; mean [today’s news] at the same time as everyone else, "said Mainzer, a member of NASA's Global Science Advisory Committee, which meets today in Washington, DC" It seems NASA is interested in continuing along this path, which, in my opinion, is great. … This is a problem that deserves to be solved. The role she and her university will play has not been defined yet.
Over the last 15 years, with the help of NASA, the Mainzer team has been perfecting the electronic components and sensors that will power the telescope. Unlike the predecessor infrared telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), NEOCam sensors will be able to operate without active refrigeration when they are parked at L1, a stable, balanced point of view between the Earth's gravity and the Earth's gravity. Sun. Engineers, on the other hand, have significantly reduced the "dark currents" of its detectors, a parasitic noise that occurs when the detectors work even under intense black conditions.
Not everyone has been a fan of NEOCam projects. Nathan Myhrvold, a billionaire technologist and former Microsoft chief technology officer in Bellevue, Washington, criticized the statistics used by Mainzer and others to generate asteroidal diameters from ######################################################################################## 39, observations of the WISE instrument, among other problems. The congressional mandate adopted in 2005, which NEOCam was designed to address, also seems less and less relevant. One change is that researchers now believe that asteroids less than 140 meters in diameter also pose a serious potential threat to the Earth, in part because they could generate damaging tsunamis. "The goal as defined [by Congress] It's not a threshold that's a success if you do it as opposed to a failure if you do not, "says Alan Harris, Planetary Scientist at MoreData in Canada, California. "This is only a random benchmark on the ground."
NASA's decision to continue the telescope comes after an embarrassing episode this summer, reported earlier this month by BuzzFeed. The agency and the ground-based telescopes failed to identify, until the last minute, an asteroid the size of a football field, called 2019 OK, which was moving slowly and only 65,000 kilometers from the Earth. It is not known if NEOCam would have detected this asteroid, but it should also investigate asteroids less than 140 meters.
It's a good move by NASA to take the telescope out of its scientific funding portfolio, Harris adds. Planetary scientists have doubted that NEOCam would lead to significant new research, a suspicion that would probably have derailed him in previous competitions. For Melosh, this does not mean, however, that these data are of less value to society. "It's something we really need to do," he says. "It may not be absolutely the best science, but knowledge goes beyond mere scientific knowledge."
This is a story in development.
[ad_2]
Source link