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Kirkland AFB, NM recently gave the University of Hawaii of Honolulu, Hawaii a modified contract for $8 million for the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS) multi-year program. The initial effort to develop and deploy a telescope data management system was awarded via a Grant to the University of Hawaii (considered a Minority Institute) and "as the various phases progressed, the Air Force determined that a Cooperative Agreement would be the more appropriate instrument as now we would be substantially involved." At this time all $8 million has been committed (FA9451-06-2-0338, P00002).
PanSTARRS will address numerous science applications ranging from the structure of the Solar System to the properties of the Universe of the largest scales. It will be able to detect and catalog large numbers of earth-orbit crossing asteroids, or near earth objects (NEO) that present a potential threat to mankind.
That last component to the mission is especially intriguing, as there is a long history of partial efforts in this direction within the US and elsewhere. So, where does this award fit in?
In many ways, it appears to be a replacement of existing efforts that have faltered, including GEODSS and NEAT. Kirtland AFB replied to DID:
"GEODSS is not involved in NEO (Near-Earth Object) work. Although "Planetary Defense" was an AF mission at one point, or at least showed up in Mission Needs statements, that was removed some time ago. At one point NEAT was located on one of the GEODSS telescopes on Maui. Because it interfered with the normal GEODSS mission, and because NEO disappeared from the AF mission, AFSPC paid AFRL to modify the 1.2-meter telescope to accommodate NEAT at prime focus. The NEAT camera was then moved to the 1.2 at AMOS.
Although the NEAT (Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking) program used the 1.2-meter telescope for a number of years, the NEAT camera was removed from the mount over a year ago and is being sent back to JPL. JPL and NASA were not paying customers for this program, the O&M was supplied by AFRL/RDSM using CA funding. When notified that AFRL funding was no longer available for support of NEAT, JPL responded that they did not have funding either. That's when the NEAT program began to shut down. NEAT still has another camera at Palomar. At this point in time, GEODSS does not support the NEO mission, and the NEAT camera is no longer used on Maui."
Additional Readings:
I suggest an armored battle station built in orbit approximately the size of a small moon. I am willing to spearhead this project. Our giant 'life ray' will obliterate any asteroid or comet up to the size of a large planet.
Frankly, it is not only the US's responsibility to worry about these things, particularly for an anti-US world. Why should America spend her own resources for something that is just as important in saving the lives of ungrateful anti-Americans.
Europe, Japan, China, Russia, etc. should be pulling their weight and contributing funding and technology.
Right. If they aren't, we shouldn't--that's not fair, them freeloading on us. After all, fairness is more important than forewarning.
This is why the US will still be the only Superpower until at least 2030.
It is a foregone assumption that the US is the nation with both the technology and resources to defend the WORLD from a threat like an asteroid, while getting no thanks, and even criticism in return.
Does the EU (a collection of 27 countries) fancy itself a superpower, with an economy bigger than the US? How about footing some of the bill? Does China want to be a superpower? How about providing some of the technology?
Until other nations/groups of nations are contributing to something like this on equal footing with America, it is a tacit admission on their part that not only is the US still going to be the only true superpower for some time, but that they are happy to be freeloaders.
If the US has a greater obligation to use its resources for climate change, then other countries have an obligation to support planetary defense. That is in fact an very accurate apples-to-apples comparison.
I'll go you one better- there is no contraversy over the fact that the earth will continue to be hit with asteroids and comets. Thats a fact, indesputable. The only question is when.
Climate change, whatever you believe about it, is rife with uncertainty. No-one knows the long term implications, although the majority acknowledge they will be bad.
No-one outside of the anti-human fringe of the environmentalists has ever argued that a dinosaur-killing sized meteor hit can be anything but immediately disasterous of proportions never before imagined.
From what i can tell, there is no global warming scenario taken seriously by scientists that comes close to equating what a planet killing meteor strike would do. And we know there are meteors and comets out there with our name on them. Its just a matter of when.
My point is that "obligation" is not taken up without will. And that saying "we didn't fund the observation effort for potential planet-killers because it wasn't fair that we fund it exclusively" doesn't provide any solace when a planet-killer shows up.
Mark Buehner,
You are right. Plus, even a small asteroid will distort the climate far more than human emissions will.
Global warming, no matter what, will not have a big effect in the next 10 years. An asteroid very well could.
Nortius,
How about we make a pact with the EU and UN : The US funds planetary defense, if the rest of the world stops harassing the US about global warming, Kyoto, etc. (particularly since China is a bigger emitted than the US).
That is a pretty good bargain for the freeloaders, given that asteroids are an indisputable threat, whereas global warming is far from certain.
GK: The irrationality of human decision making has finally had some attempted study in the last few decades. No bet that what you propose will fly, no matter how reasonable it seems to you. "Everybody" [too many people] "know(s)" that AGW is real and bad, because they keep being told it. "Nobody" [too few people] thinks about planet-killing asteroids when they look at the sky.
There have been some NEO tracking efforts in Europe, and Japan too I believe. This isn't solely an American phenomenon, though contributions from all governments have been very, very slim to date.
Nortius,
I notice that there were films in the 1990s that were devoted to asteroids hitting us (Deep Impact, Armageddon). These did well at the Box Office, indicating a demand for the genre.
Somehow, pop culture has decided that the risk of asteroids has abated. Coincidence? Or is it because Hollywood is not going to produce anything that shows the US as a savior?
Just like Al Gore shrewdly chose this issue with which to enrich himself and collect accolades like the Nobel Prize and Oscar, the planetary defense issue is open for the taking.
It's thankless work, for at least two reasons:
See also Taleb's "Black Swan".
As with anything, we need a small asteroid to hit and cause some damage. Then, everyone will get behind a defense mechanism to stop bigger ones.
Just like it took 9/11 to trigger actions that should have happened before 9/11, the same will apply here. Hopefully, the small asteroid happens before a bigger one.
GK:
Sure. Unfortunately, something important is going to have to be turned into a crater before this particular problem is taken seriously. (This also applies to other problems that I probably don't have to mention).
Maybe, if we are very lucky indeed, the rock will land on another rock and solve the other possible reason for losing a significant fraction of humanity, in the process.
Also unfortunately, on the second point I disagree with you. 9/11 triggered something, that's true. But it wasn't the right something.
"Sure. Unfortunately, something important is going to have to be turned into a crater before this particular problem is taken seriously. "
If we are lucky, we get a Tunguska-type event, where the visual/audible impact is dramatic but human casualties are minimal due to the impact being in an area of few inhabitants.
That is what we need....
50% of people live on 1% of the land area. Plus 75% of the Earth is water (the Tsunami effect notwithstanding). So we need a Tunguska-type event to hit an uninhabited land area. The second choice would be the Ocean in the Southern Hemisphere.
"9/11 triggered something, that's true. But it wasn't the right something."
I disagree, but am in no mood to debate that now. I think the domino effect, which is a 30-year process, has already manifested. Except that we are only in the first 5-7 years of it.
GK:
I'd like to agree with your first point, except that it's already happened and we haven't learned from it. Twice in the 20th century (Tunguska and Brazil in the 1930s) and once so far in the 21st - northern Norway.
Nothing important to humans was destroyed in any of those cases, so we haven't learned from them. People tend only to learn when something hurts, and often not then - so I think that it's going to take a minor city going up in smoke to make governments realise there is a problem. If only because that will suddenly become the way to stay in power.
The odds are that it will be a Tunguska-sized event, not a Chixculub. The odds are good - but I don't like the size of the bet.
Of course, there are several other possible events that will be a problem for the whole of civilisation - Yellowstone and Cumbre Vieja being among them, as are some sort of mutated superflu, grey goo and good old-fashioned global thermonuclear war. All this tells us that we need more baskets for our irreplaceable eggs.
Your second point? Well, the right response was to start the process of cutting the fanatics off at the knees by cutting down their money tree. Part of that would overlap with the solution to problem #1. Spending 4000+ American lives, those of half a million Iraqis and 650 billion dollars (so far!) doesn't help. Especially as the culprits were not the target of America's revenge.
"Twice in the 20th century (Tunguska and Brazil in the 1930s) and once so far in the 21st - northern Norway."
It has to happen in the Internet/Cable TV/YouTube/Google Earth era...
"People tend only to learn when something hurts, and often not then "
Not always. Global warming has not yet hurt anyone, yet has become a religion.
"Well, the right response was to start the process of cutting the fanatics off at the knees by cutting down their money tree."
No Democrat or Republican would do that. Plus, terrorism existed even in the 1990s when oil was cheap (1993 WTC, Khobar Towers, Kenya/Tanzania embassies, USS Cole (2000)).
"Spending 4000+ American lives, those of half a million Iraqis and 650 billion dollars (so far!) doesn't help. "
I think it helps. We have had no attacks on US soil in 7 years, mainly due to the flypaper effect of our troops in Iraq.
Half a million? Surely you don't believe the Lancet nonsense. Plus, Saddam's Oil-fo-Food killed millions, so by stopping that, we still saved a net total of hundreds of thousands of lives.
I am surprised that someone who reads Winds of Change would still be this uninformed about Iraq.
Perhaps I should explain what "cutting down the money tree" meant. What I meant was doing so by making oil much less important, so that subsequent to that action could indeed be taken.
Methods include solar (ground-based and SPS), Polywell fusion, thermal depolymerisation, cellulosic ethanol, growing oily blue-green algae, wave power, ocean thermal, pebble-bed fusion, geothermal... Never mind; the list goes on and on. Some of these have been shown to work in trials at various scales; some of them have theoretical promise; and at least one of them has many other benefits. And serious work could have been done on all of them for a relatively small fraction of what's been spent in money terms alone on the "War on Terror".
When one or more of these approaches to energy independence works; spend a little more on some way of turning it into portable energy (there are many), get that done.
Then mine the Persian Gulf, blow up all the pipelines - and let the neck-choppers see whether oil is edible.
It won't happen, of course. American politics (and British too, to be fair) is bought and paid for long since.
Fletcher,
I don't know. The progress in Solar, Batteries, Cellulostic Ethanol, and advanced nanomaterials (that lower the weight of cars and planes) is very rapid. I continue to be surprised to the upside on the rate of new advances.
That being said, while by 2030 most cars will not be running on oil (or will be so high mpg that it won't matter), air travel will still be heavily dependent on petroleum.
But again, I remind you that Islamic terrorism was happening even when oil was $10/gallon in the 1990s. So I don't think that corelation is as close as many assume.
The Arabs (at least the ruling classes) have had so much money they don't know what to do with it for many years - certainly since well before the 1990s. After all, if there is more than enough how much does it matter how much more than enough there is?
There is also an indirect effect. People who want to kill us own large parts of our economy, simply because they are the ones with the money. That ought to stop, and it ought to stop as soon as possible. If oil becomes irrelevant then action can be taken; and one of those actions is to seize all assets owned by nationals of countries that have overthrow of the West as official policy. After all, they didn't do any of the work to get the oil out of the ground; Westerners did.