WASHINGTON - NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn’t have the money to do the job, a federal report says.
That’s because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave the National Aeronautics and Space Administration money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says. Specifically, NASA has been given until 2020 to spot 90 percent of the potentially deadly rocks hurtling through space.
Even so, NASA says it has completed about one-third of its assignment with its current telescope system.
NASA estimates that there are about 20,000 asteroids and comets in our solar system that are potential threats to Earth. They are larger than 460 feet in diameter - slightly smaller than the Superdome in New Orleans. So far, scientists know where about 6,000 of these objects are.
Rocks with a diameter of between 460 feet and 3,280 feet can devastate a region but not the entire globe, said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s manager of the near-Earth objects program.
Just last month astronomers were surprised when an object of unknown size and origin bashed into Jupiter and created an Earth-sized bruise that is still spreading. Jupiter is slammed more often than Earth because of its immense gravity, enormous size, and location.
Disaster movies like “Armageddon’’ and close calls in previous years may have scared people and alerted them to a serious issue, but when it comes to doing something about monitoring the threat, the academy concluded, “there has been relatively little effort by the US government.’’
But Washington is practically the only government doing anything at all, the report found.
NASA calculated that to spot the asteroids as required by law would cost about $800 million between now and 2020, either with a new ground-based telescope or a space observation system, Johnson said. If NASA received only $300 million, it could find most of the asteroids larger than 1,000 feet across, he said.
