The discovery of an asteroid the size of a small shipping truck mere days before it passed Earth on Thursday, albeit one that posed no threat to humans, highlights a blind spot in our ability to predict those that could actually cause damage, astronomers say. NASA for years has prioritized detecting asteroids much bigger and more existentially threatening than 2023 BU, the small space rock that streaked by 2,200 miles from the Earth \u2018s surface, closer than some satellites. If bound for Earth , it would have been pulverized in the atmosphere, with only small fragments possibly reaching land.
But 2023 BU sits on the smaller end of a size group, asteroids 5-to-50 meters in diameter, that also includes those as big as an Olympic swimming pool. Objects that size are difficult to detect until they wander much closer to Earth , complicating any efforts to brace for one that could impact a populated area. The probability of an Earth impact by a space rock, called a meteor when it enters the atmosphere, of that size range is fairly low, scaling according to the asteroid\u2019s size: a 5-meter rock is estimated to target Earth once a year, and a 50-meter rock once every thousand years, according to NASA .
But with current capabilities, astronomers can\u2019t see when such a rock targets Earth until days prior. \u201cWe don\u2019t know where most of the asteroids are that can cause local to regional devastation,\u201d said Terik Daly , a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
The roughly 20-meter meteor that exploded in 2013 over Chelyabinsk , Russia is a once-every-100-years event, according to NASA \u2018s Jet Propulsion Laboratory . It created a shockwave that shattered tens of thousands of windows and caused $33 million in damage, and no one saw it coming before it entered Earth \u2018s atmosphere. Some astronomers consider relying only on statistical probabilities and estimates of asteroid populations an unnecessary risk, when improvements could be made to NASA \u2018s ability to detect them.
\u201cHow many natural hazards are there that we could actually do something about and prevent for a billion dollars? There\u2019s not many,\u201d said Daly , whose work focuses on defending Earth from hazardous asteroids. One major upgrade to NASA \u2018s detection arsenal will be NEO Surveyor , a $1.2 billion telescope under development that will launch nearly a million miles from Earth and surveil a wide field of asteroids. It promises a significant advantage over today\u2019s ground-based telescopes that are hindered by daytime light and Earth \u2018s atmosphere. That new telescope will help NASA meet a goal assigned by Congress in 2005: detect 90% of the total expected amount of asteroids bigger than 140 meters, or those big enough to destroy anything from a region to an entire continent.
\u201cWith Surveyor , we\u2019re really focusing on finding the one asteroid that could cause a really bad day for a lot of people,\u201d said Amy Mainzer , NEO Surveyor principal investigator. \u201cBut we\u2019re also tasked with getting good statistics on the smaller objects, down to about the size of the Chelyabinsk object.\u201d NASA has fallen years behind on its congressional goal, which was ordered for completion by 2020. The agency proposed last year to cut the telescope\u2019s 2023 budget by three quarters and a two-year launch delay to 2028 \u201cto support higher-priority missions\u201d elsewhere in NASA \u2018s science portfolio.
Asteroid detection gained greater importance last year after NASA slammed a refrigerator-sized spacecraft into an asteroid to test its ability to knock a potentially hazardous space rock off a collision course with Earth . The successful demonstration, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), affirmed for the first time a method of planetary defense.
\u201cNEO Surveyor is of the utmost importance, especially now that we know from DART that we really can do something about it,\u201d Daly said. \u201cSo by golly, we gotta find these asteroids.\u201d
(Reuters)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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