After NASA’s DART asteroid-deflection experiment, a fully funded telescope for detecting space rocks is an equally pressing priority.
The DART team cheers after receiving confirmation that its spacecraft had successfully collided with the asteroid moon Dimorphos.It was a crash for the ages. On 26 September, 11 million kilometres from Earth, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft met a spectacular end as it hurtled into a tiny asteroid moon named Dimorphos. This was the first test of whether humanity can alter the orbit of a space rock, by accelerating Dimorphos in its orbit.
The risk of such an errant body crashing into Earth and causing major loss of life is small, but not zero — scientists estimate that relatively large space rocks strike every few centuries to millennia. An event with catastrophic consequences — even if it is very unlikely to happen — must be taken seriously. After all, the dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago when an asteroid blasted what is now Mexico.
The small — but non-zero — risk of a dangerous space rock popping up sooner means this is not good enough. NASA has been slow-walking the development of a custom-built space-based telescope to search for near-Earth objects for many years. It had given small amounts of money to a predecessor mission before embarking on the first stages of NEO Surveyor in 2019.
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