U.S. urged to prepare for asteroid strike
Pastor Dale Morgan
U.S. urged to prepare for asteroid strike*
2008-07-07
LOS ANGELES, July 7 (Xinhua) -- U.S. scientists have urged the U.S.
government to take further defensive measures against near-Earth
objects, The Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday.
The United States was not doing enough to defend the planet against
the dangers posed by near-Earth objects, said a group of scientists who
observed the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid event this week
in Los Angeles.
"We are not prepared at this time to prevent the massive death and
destruction that would occur if an object from space hit the Earth as it
did in Tunguska" in Siberia, said Republican Congressman Dana
Rohrabacher who joined the scientists in the event.
He was referring to an explosion in the air above Tunguska, a remote
river valley in eastern Russia on June 30, 1908, which flattened trees
over an 800-square-mile (1280-square-kilometer) area, but no one was
killed. Although no one is positive what caused the Tunguska event, most
scientists believe an asteroid about 150 feet across exploded.
If an asteroid the size of the one believed to have exploded in the
air above Tunguska were to explode over Los Angeles, the destruction
would be greater, Rohrabacher told a news conference at the Pasadena
offices of the Planetary Society in Los Angeles.
NASA has established a Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to monitor potentially
dangerous asteroids. The most scrutinized is Apophis, which has about a
one-in-45,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036, according to Don Yeomans,
manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office. Apophis is about five
times the suspected size of the Tunguska object.
But Alan Harris, a senior research scientist at the Space Science
Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said the greatest danger does not come
from the objects we know about but from the ones we haven't identified.
In one example of the lack of attention the issue is receiving in
Washington, Rohrabacher said, funding for the Arecibo, Puerto Rico,
radio telescope, which hunts near-Earth objects, is in danger in next
year's budget.
If scientists are able to identify a potential killer asteroid, the
deeper question is how to deflect it.
Theorists have proposed a variety of possible solutions, including
using a nuclear weapon to blow it up or sending a spacecraft that would
use gravity to drag the object off its destructive path.