'We are finally going to rely on knowledge, rather than luck, as our plan for dealing with hazardous asteroids,' said one outside expert.
“This one did sneak up on us and it is an interesting story on the limitations of our current survey network,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, wrote in an internal email days after the event.
The decision announced by NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen at a planetary science advisory committee meeting ended a 15-year impasse with Congress, which requested a survey of asteroids larger than 460 feet across in 2005. A June National Academies of Sciences reportfor never providing the funding for an asteroid-spotting spacecraft, stalled in review of its design since it was turned down as a science mission by NASA in 2014.
With the new announcement, NASA is signaling that improved satellite capabilities are a necessity, not a perk. “Make no mistake, the key objective here is planetary defense,” Zurbuchen said. “We are finally going to rely on knowledge, rather than luck, as our plan for dealing with hazardous asteroids,” MIT planetary scientist Richard Binzel told BuzzFeed News. “NASA’s commitment to a space-based asteroid survey is a huge step forward for anyone who cares about human destiny.”
According to Zurbuchen, the asteroid surveyor will follow the design for the previously proposed Near-Earth Object Camera spacecraft headed by astronomer Amy Mainzer of the University of Arizona, but will be developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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