Source:
The Cornell Daily SunNew Technology Reveals Close Calls With Asteroids
April 15, 2009 - 5:00am
By A. Drew Muscente
On Feb. 28, sky-watchers at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia sighted an unexpected guest: an asteroid heading directly toward the Earth. From the uncharted reaches of space, the asteroid zoomed toward the planet at 12 miles per second, forcing physicists to scramble for their calculators and crunch the numbers. Within minutes, the astronomers calculated the asteroid’s size, mass, speed and vector.
At approximately 69 ft. to 154 ft. in diameter, Asteroid 2009 DD45 posed a serious threat to the planet, and despite global surveillance, no one saw it coming. A similar asteroid destroyed 800 square miles of Siberian forest in the early twentieth century.
In response to similar near-Earth encounters, Congress is currently investigating the possibility of a new mandate that would require astronomers to identify and analyze all 140 meter near-Earth objects by 2020. The most recent Congressional mandate required astronomers to identify all 1000 meter near-Earth objects by 2012.
“In the future, we’re going to have hundreds of thousands to look at, but only thousands will be threatening,” explained Prof. Joseph Burns, planetary sciences. According to Burns, in past years, similar asteroids repeatedly passed near the planet, but due to the development of modern surveying technology, scientists and politicians express increasing desire to identify possible threats. “We have an incomplete sample of everything out there,” he said. “What we’re doing now is building a couple of large telescope systems.”
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http://cornellsun.com/node/36816
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