Planned NASA Satellite to Detect Deadly Earthbound Asteroids
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According to Business Insider: “NASA is finally planning to launch a space telescope to detect deadly asteroids before they hit Earth. Here’s how it could work.”
The telescope will use infrared radiation to detect the heat of rocks hurtling through space. For now, NASA administrators are calling it the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission (NEOSM).
“This is a great step forward for thinking about human destiny, because the dinosaurs certainly did not have an asteroid survey program to protect themselves,” Richard Binzel, an asteroid researcher and professor of planetary sciences at MIT, told Business Insider. “Having knowledge of what’s out there is something that the planetary science community has been advocating for for nearly 30 years. So this is a breakthrough decades in the making.”NASA’s new mission is expected to cost between $500 million and $600 million. It could launch as early as 2025, though that’s not an official timeline.
“We’re finally in a position where we can say we’re ready to move forward,” Lori Glaze, director of the agency’s Planetary Science Division, said in a NASA committee meeting. “It’s a really big deal that we’re at this point.”
‘Planet defense is something that we have to deal with’
Any space rock with an orbit that takes it within 125 million miles (200 million kilometers) of the sun is considered an NEO (near-Earth object). So far, humanity has located about 15,500 such objects.