Lawmakers should consider making NASA or another agency responsible for defending against an asteroid or other space object that could hit Earth and kill millions of people, according to a leading space advocate in Congress.
“We should demand someone, whether it’s NASA or whoever, actually has a system where they say ‘punch the red button, it’s time to go on this particular emergency,’” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), a senior member of the House Science Committee’s space panel. “We need to do that.”
NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office would notify other federal agencies if a near-Earth object threatened to hit the planet and cause catastrophic damage. But NASA is not assembling a system to defend against such objects, Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot said.
If a notification occurred, “we’d have to see what we would do at that point,” Lightfoot testified at a June 8 hearing on his agency’s fiscal year 2018 budget request. “We’re not building anything related to that.”
While no known asteroid poses a significant risk of hitting Earth over the next 100 years, an average of 30 near-Earth asteroids are discovered each week, according to NASA’s website. NASA is studying ways to deflect an asteroid, such as hitting it with an object to slow it down. Such a diversion would take years to achieve, requiring early detection of the threat.
“An asteroid on a trajectory to impact Earth could not be shot down in the last few minutes or even hours before impact,” NASA’s website says. “No known weapon system could stop the mass because of the velocity at which it travels — an average of 12 miles per second.”
Also during the hearing, Rohrabacher suggested that NASA pursue an international effort to remove the increasing amount of debris in space, such as defunct satellites and used rocket stages. Such debris, also known as space junk, poses a growing threat to expensive spacecraft, such as the agency’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the congressman lamented.
“I would hate to think of a little bit of space debris coming along and negating $2 billion or $3 billion of spending on an SLS rocket,” Rohrabacher said. “We ought to get serious about space debris before space debris starts hemming us in so much that it puts costly restrictions on our own space program.”
Lightfoot said NASA is undertaking a “very low-level effort” to develop technologies to remove space junk. According to the agency’s website, NASA typically prevents collisions with space debris by maneuvering orbiting spacecraft away from danger.