It's just another illustration of the misplaced priorities of our administration.
At PhysOrg.com they've posted this article.
Congress in 2005 asked NASA to come up with a plan to track most killer asteroids and propose how to deflect the potentially catastrophic ones.
Well, they've done it, but ...
"We know what to do, we just don't have the money," said Simon "Pete" Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center.
You probably know that "killer asteroids" are those big rocks floating around in space. They are only "killers" if they're big enough and actually hit earth. You know, like the one that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (or 6000 years ago, if you're a fundy).
Well, NASA followed orders and figured out a way to find and track 20,000 of these asteroids. They know how to track rocks down to the size of New Orleans' Superdome. Right now they can only track things 7 times larger than that.
Now for the punchline.
They can't afford it. Depending on how it's done, the project will cost between $800 million and $1.1 billion. Now let's see, that's ... oh, about 3.5 days worth of our stew-making in Iraq.
If you think global warming will make you sweat, just watch what happens when a killer asteroid hits.
For example, astrogeologists have:
determined that during the last 600 million years, the Earth has been struck by 60 objects of a diameter of five kilometers or more. The smallest of these impactors would release the equivalent of 10,000,000 (ten million) megatons of TNT and leave a crater 95 kilometers across. For comparison, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of 50 megatons.
Deflecting these asteroids is the logical goal, but,
"You can't deflect them if you can't find them."
Is 3.5 days of war in Iraq as important as pursuing as this?