Posted on behalf of Janet Fang

The $4 million that the United States spends each year searching for near-Earth objects (NEOs) is not enough to meet a congressional mandate, according to a National Research Council (NRC) report released last week. In it the NRC outlined ways to detect more asteroids and comets that are potential threats should they cross into our orbit.

Under a 2005 act, NASA must discover 90 percent of these NEOs with diameters of 140 meters or greater by 2020, and in 2008, Congress asked the NRC to figure out the best approach. Last year, an NRC committee concluded it was impossible for NASA to reach that goal.

In their final report from last week, the NRC found that “the administration has not requested and Congress has not appropriated new funds to meet this objective”. The committee laid out two approaches that could allow NASA to achieve this goal shortly after 2020. A combined space-based and ground-based telescopes approach could finish the survey by 2022. If saving money is more important, a ground-based telescope only approach is preferred.

On 12 January, NASA’s recently launched Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer discovered its first never-before-seen near-Earth asteroid (red dot, right) — about 1 kilometer in diameter (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). An NEO about 10 times wider struck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, wiping out dinosaurs in one of Earth’s biggest global mass extinctions. Objects this large strike Earth every 100 million years; NEOs in this congressionally mandated survey strike every 30,000 years on average and the damage, though regional, could be devastating (NAS News).

The risk of actually being killed by an NEO impact “is comparable to the risk of being one of the 50 or so people who die on an amusement park ride each year,” Wired says: “The difference is that a major asteroid would kill many people all at once.”

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA