Washington, January 24: The US is doing little to defend the planet against potentially devastating asteroids and is not doing the basic searches that Congress has ordered, according to a report released on Friday.
While most of the really big and obvious threats are being found, almost nothing is being done to find the smaller objects that are arguably a more likely threat, the strongly worded report from the National Academy of Sciences said.
“It means we are not looking for the small ones which can cause huge damage on earth,” astronomer Mike A’Hearn of the University of Maryland, who helped chair the committee that wrote the report, said in a telephone interview.
“Why has nothing been done? I don’t know,” added A’Hearn, who was principal investigator of Nasa’s 2005 Deep Impact mission to knock open the comet 9P/Tempel.
He said it was not clear whether the administration of President Barack Obama, who has declared his support for science but is struggling with an economic downturn and budget deficits, would work any harder to do more.
The US spends about $4m a year looking for near-Earth objects, or NEOs, that might come too close. In 2005, Congress ordered a broader survey to find 90% of near-Earth objects 140m in diameter or greater.
Something this big could cause enormous regional damage.
But Congress has not funded this search and neither former President George W Bush nor Obama have asked for it.
A’Hearn’s committee made several recommendations.
“They are all expensive compared to what we are spending now. Compared to other things the country is spending money on they aren’t expensive,” he said.
“The minimal sensible programme is probably two and a half times larger than the current programme,” he added.
To simply do what Congress asked in 2005 would likely cost $4m, A’Hearn said.
—Agencies