UN Goes Into Asteroid Deflection Business

by Len Neighbors
02/20/2006

Since the planet is pretty much fixed otherwise, the United Nations has turned its ever watchful eye to the task of planning for a collision with a near-Earth object (NEO). From the article:

The UN draft treaty would establish who should be in charge in the event of an asteroid heading towards Earth, who would pay for relief efforts and the policies that should be adopted.

In addition, it would set out possible plans to deflect the object.

Notice that the UN is concerned with power, who gets the bill, and actually solving the problem (in that order, apparently). They do have some nifty ideas, ripped from yesterday's box office records:

Ideas could include hitting the asteroid with a spacecraft or rocket to deflect its orbit.

Other less destructive proposals include a "gravity tug" that would simply hover over the asteroid and use gravity as a "towline" to change its path.

But any decision to deflect an NEO could come with its own set of conundrums for the UN, as changing its path may simply alter its final target.

"It's important to understand when you start to deflect an asteroid that certain countries are going to have accept an increase in risk to their populations in order to take the risk to zero for everyone," said Dr Schweickart.

It is difficult decisions like this that can only be addressed by the UN, the Association of Space Explorers believes.

While the chance that our planet could be smacked by a rock the size of England is genuinely worrisome, setting up an international committee to figure out how to redirect said rock to impact a location of their choosing is actually slightly more worrisome. We prefer the visual of the Hollywood style unlikely-collection-of-misfits-saves-the-world scenario to the hordes-of-UN-bureaucrats-build-gigantic-weapons-platform-over-brunch scenario.

Alan Boyle over at Cosmic Log has a great piece on NASA's efforts to track asteroids. He has the following to say about Apophis, a very special rock:

Apophis has emerged as the "poster child" for the assessment of asteroid collision threats, said Steven Chesley of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Initially, the uncertainties surrounding observations of Apophis' orbital path were so great that experts gave it a 1-in-40 chance of hitting Earth in 2029. Since then, more observations have reduced the risk in 2029 to zero, but that 1-in-45,000 chance remains for a later encounter in 2036.

Chesley said that astronomers have been swarming to make more detailed observations of Apophis over the past couple of months. Those observations - which have not been fully analyzed yet - just might rule out an impact in 2036. "Stay tuned for that," he said.

And stay tuned we will.

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