Putting Earth & the Future of the Human Species at Risk for the Price of 40 City Buses

Shuttering Arecibo's NEO Asteroid-Warning System: Putting Earth & the Future of the Human Species at Risk for the Price of 40 City Buses

If there was ever a better combination of the very best and worst examples of human intelligence than science project funding, we've yet to find it. It's a veritable yin-yang of our endeavors, the very furthest imaginings of our capability crippled by our most short-sighted stupidity. The most recent example of this idiocy is the way the US government might close down facilities able to detect objects approaching Earth because we don't have enough ability to do so. Yes, you read that right, and no, it doesn't make a lick of sense.

The facility under the hammer is Arecibo, an immense three-hundred-meter radio telescope with "unmatched precision and accuracy" in detecting comets and asteroids (and that's not us cheerleading, that's the text of an official government committee report). Imagine the giant facility from GoldenEye. Now realise that that actually was Arecibo - yes, the people who make Bond movies looked at this scientific installation and realized "We can't make anything cooler than that!", and filmed Bond over the real research dish. That's what might be closed.

The National Science Foundation has recommended that the observatories funding be basically murdered, cut to 40% by 2011, and the thing about operating budgets is that's how much money you actually need to run the thing. The issue up for debate is now whether a 2005 Congressional mandate that NASA detect 90% of all "things like the ones from Armageddon and Deep Impact" before those movies actually happen. (Okay, this time it's not a real quote, but that's the idea.)

Arecibo is the best there is at what it does, like Wolverine except actually useful, and it's appalling that such a tool should be turned off. It's not just a Near Earth Object (NEO) detector: it's the device that worked out the period of Mercury, first imaged an asteroid, detected the first binary pulsar, and provided some of the first evidence of neutron stars. This thing is the Swiss Army Knife of astronomical discovery - and now they want to kill it for less than the cost of forty city buses?

Luke McKinney
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/10/shuttering-arecibos-neo-asteroidwarning-system-putting-planet-earth-the-future-of-the-human-species-.html#more

I keep thinking there must be another side to this...

using to bail out useless companies like say, Tesla Motors?

it shouldn't be hard to come up with the comparative pittance keeping this facility open would require...

billionaires.

In this context, it disgusts me.

Too bad about your telescope.

This is mere speculation but the SBSS satellite due for launch in the near future may be very effective at detecting asteroids. Its actually a military satellite though.

Google it and decide for yourself.

The article I read at globalsecurity.org talked only about tracking objects in Earth orbit. What we need for "planet insurance" is detection and tracking of objects elsewhere in the solar system.

And there's plenty of other science Arecibo is good for that even timesharing a military surveillance satellite would not help.

Still, I'd also like to think there's something better in the works...

- if the military wanted to look for them. With optical detectors there isn't that much difference between sensing deep space objects and a satellite in geosynchronous or highly elliptical orbit.

Never the less, its horrible that Arecibo's funding was cut.

From what I was able to find, the SBSS satellites will be in low Earth orbit and are designed to track objects out to geosynchronous orbits. I suppose they could be turned to look outward, but the design goal of being able to quickly (on a time scale of hours) locate and establish orbits for manmade objects going around the Earth strikes me as very different from trying to do early detection and orbit tracking for far more distant objects. I can easily imagine ways in which optimizing the sensors and data processing for the primary task could render them less effective at finding asteroids, etc. (For instance, to pick up a comet or Earth-crossing asteroid far away you need to look for very faint objects moving every so slowly against the background star field, while for surveillance of Earth orbit you want to identify objects that are moving quickly against the same kind of background.) Conceptually the tasks are very similar, but the details might dictate very different designs for an effective satellite. What's signal for one task may be noise for the other.