</s>It’s not a matter of if, but rather when, a large asteroid or comet impacts Earth. It has happened many times in the past, but Earth has never been home to a spacefaring species before. With enough warning, humanity could potentially avoid impacts, or at least mitigate the effects. NASA just hosted a webcast to unveil the new Near-Earth Object Preparedness Plan. It addresses five goals for the US government to work on in order to save us from the next killer impact.

The preparedness plan involves input from more than a dozen government agencies. including NASA, FEMA, and NOAA. The report begins by stressing the potential danger of near-Earth objects (NEOs). These objects are defined as any asteroid or comet that passes within 30 million miles (48.3 million kilometers) of the planet. The graph below estimates the destructive potential of impactors, as well as how many of them are lurking in the space around Earth. Even small 20-meter objects like the Chelyabinsk, Russia asteroid can cause damage over a wide area. That asteroid exploded before reaching the ground and released 20-30 times more energy than the first atomic bombs.

The report calls on the government to first strengthen detection and tracking technologies. If we can’t see the threat coming sufficiently far in advance, there’s little chance we could prevent or even prepare for the impact. NASA has been surveying NEOs in the range of 1 kilometer or larger since the late 1990s. The plan directs agencies to look at ways to improve NEO detection with upcoming telescope projects, as well as develop new projects with the express purpose of tracking dangerous objects. This includes both ground-based facilities and space missions.

The second goal is to develop new tools for modeling and predicting the effects of impacts. These tools should be available to all agencies to ensure we’re working from the best data in the event of an impending impact. The third goal involves stopping impacts from happening in the first place, which means we’d never have to find out how accurate those models are in real life. The report directs agencies to assess technology that could realistically deflect an incoming asteroid or comet. NASA, the DoD, and the Air Force Space Command should develop these technologies (like the Hammer spacecraft) and work toward demonstration flights in the future.

Step four is mostly an exercise in diplomacy. The report suggests that the State Department and NASA work together to increase international awareness of impact threats, and improve cooperation with other governments to detect and thwart impacts. If none of that works, there’s the fifth and final goal. That’s the one that covers what to do if we can’t stop a NEO or don’t see it until it’s already on top of us. The plan calls on NASA, FEMA, and other agencies to create theoretical scenarios based on plausible impact events. These scenarios will inform the development of protocols for communication, emergency response, and ways to mitigate damage on the ground.

NASA says the 20-page report is a modest effort, but it can “dramatically increase” our preparedness in the event a dangerous object crosses paths with Earth. You can read the full report on the White House website.</s>(CBS) — The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is spearheading a 10-year plan to improve detection of near-Earth asteroids and comets that could crash into Earth and to expand research into possible countermeasures to deflect an incoming body if detected in time, officials said Wednesday.

The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan also calls for increased international cooperation to prepare for potential global impact threats and work to strengthen U.S. emergency procedures and protocols, familiarizing state and local management personnel with the unusual nature of the threat.

“For emergency managers, this is so different we have to first educate them,” said Leviticus Lewis, an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

“Everybody in America knows what a hurricane curve looks like, or the error cone. But if we show impact possibilities for an asteroid, most emergency managers will have no idea what that means or how NASA even came up with this information.”

The strategy and action plan says it is intended to “inform” policy development and that future funding “will be determined through the budget process.”

“Fortunately, this type of destructive event is extremely rare,” said Aaron Miles, representing the OSTP. “NASA and its partners have identified more than 95 percent of all asteroids that are large enough to cause a global catastrophe, and none of those found poses a threat within this century. Nevertheless, asteroid impacts do occur.”

One hundred years ago, an object estimated at 130 to 200 feet across exploded over Tunguska, Russia, in 1908, releasing the energy equivalent of up to 10 million tons of TNT and flattening trees across 770 square miles. The devastation from a similar event today would stretch across the entire metropolitan New York area.

In February 2013, a 60-foot-wide meteor exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, releasing the energy of 30 atomic bombs, damaging buildings below and injuring more than 1,000 people. Current estimates indicate a population of nearly 10 million NEOs larger than 60 feet across.

Chelyabinsk-class events happen every 30 to 40 years, researchers calculate, while impacts by objects with diameters greater than one mile occur once every several hundred thousand years.

But every day, more than 100 tons of asteroid and comet debris slams into Earth’s atmosphere and while the vast majority of it burns up high above the surface, objects with diameters larger than about 328 feet can survive long enough to hit the ground.

“The United States can and should continue to prepare for the possibility of a future asteroid threat,” Miles said. “Effective emergency response procedures can save lives and unlike most natural disasters, asteroid impacts are preventable.”

Implementing the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan “will significantly improve America’s capacity and readiness to warn against, prepare for and prevent damaging asteroid impacts.”

Comets and asteroids that pass within 28 million miles of Earth’s orbit are officially classified as near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Those predicted to pass within about 4.6 million miles of Earth — less than 19.5 times the Earth-moon distance — are known as potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs.

There were 18,310 known NEOs as of June 18 and more than 1,885 known PHAs, 57 of which are more than 3,280 feet — one kilometer — in diameter. Such objects are informally known as “planet busters” because an impact would trigger a global catastrophe. The impact of an asteroid about six miles in diameter some 65 million years ago led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species.

“NASA is confident that it has discovered and cataloged all near-Earth asteroids large enough to cause significant global damage and determined that they are not on collision courses with Earth, but there is still some chance that large comets from the outer solar system could appear and impact the Earth with warning times as short as a few months,” the action plan says.

In 1994, Congress ordered NASA to identify and characterize, within 10 years, 90 percent of all comets and asteroids with diameters greater than one kilometer — .62 miles, or 3,280 feet — that travel in orbits that can intersect Earth’s path around the sun.

In 2005, the search was expanded to include the identification of 90 percent of near-Earth objects with diameters greater than 460 feet.

“Since 2005, the number of NEOs catalogued in this range has almost tripled, while the total number of catalogued NEOs has increased by almost five times,” the action plan states. “Nevertheless, according to a 2017 report from NASA’s NEO Science Definition Team, current observational capabilities are suited to only finding less than half of all 140 meter objects by 2033, and planned improvements will still fall short of the timeline that Congress directed.”

The action plans calls for expanding the search for NEOs, streamlining inter-agency communications to deal with possible threats, educating state and local emergency management personnel and developing more detailed plans to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

Lindley Johnson, a senior planner with the Planetary Defense Coordination Officeat NASA Headquarters in Washington, said engineers envision three basic techniques for deflecting an incoming asteroid, all of which require months or years of advance warning.

One method would use a so-called “gravity tug,” a spacecraft that would fly in tandem with the approaching body to gently nudge it off course with its own minuscule gravity. Another technique calls for crashing a robotic spacecraft into an asteroid at extremely high speed to knock it off course. A demonstration flight is planned in the early 2020s.

A third, more drastic, option would be to detonate a nuclear device near the approaching body, not to break it up but to heat its surface to the point that the plume would effectively blow it off its trajectory.

But any such flight would require advance warning, enough to launch spacecraft on missions laster longer than a year to reach the target far enough out to deflect it from Earth.

Despite President Trump’s call Tuesday for establishment of a new “Space Force,” Johnson said no astronauts would be involved.

“It makes a good movie,” he said, but “the type of missions that you’re talking about here that are months or years in duration make it difficult with our current capabilities for human spaceflight. Our studies just don’t show that is a needed element.”</s>NASA has updated its plans to deflect potentially hazardous Earth-bound asteroids — and none of them involve Bruce Willis.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a new report Thursday titled the "National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan." The 18-page document outlines the steps that NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency will take over the next 10 years to both prevent dangerous asteroids from striking Earth and prepare the country for the potential consequences of such an event.

Officials with NASA, FEMA and the White House discussed the new asteroid-mitigation strategies in a teleconference with the media on Thursday. "An asteroid impact is one of the possible scenarios that we must be prepared for," Leviticus Lewis, chief of FEMA's National Response Coordination Branch, said on the teleconference, adding that a catastrophic asteroid strike is "a low-probability but high-consequence event" for which "some degree of preparedness is necessary." [Related: How Trump's Space Force Would Help Protect Earth from Future Asteroid Threats]

"This plan is an outline not only to enhance the hunt for hazardous asteroids, but also to better predict their chances of being an impact threat well into the future and the potential effects that it could have on Earth," NASA's planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson said. Johnson added that the plan will help NASA "step up our efforts to demonstrate possible asteroid deflection and other mitigation techniques, and to better formalize across the U.S. government the processes and protocols for dissemination of the best information available so that timely decisions can be made."

Protecting Earth from incoming asteroids will be a huge job, but don't expect astronauts to do it, NASA said. "That's something relegated to the movies — it makes a good movie, but we do not see in our studies any technique that would require the involvement of astronauts," Johnson said, adding that all of NASA's proposed asteroid-deflection techniques "would all be done by robotic spacecraft." [7 Awesomme Sci-Fi Movies Where Asteroids Threaten Earth]

Five ways to prepare for asteroids

Five major objectives are detailed in the new plan. In the first, NASA is directed to lead a new effort to enhance the nation's ability to detect, track and characterize near-Earth asteroids, in order to "reduce current levels of uncertainty and aid in more accurate modeling and more effective decision-making," the document states.

NASA already supports several ground-based observatories that scan the skies for asteroids — like the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona; the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Maui; and the NEOWISE space telescope. While the new report doesn't ask NASA scientists to start planning for additional missions, it does request that the agency "identify opportunities in existing and planned telescope programs to improve detection and tracking by enhancing the volume and quality of current data streams."

The second goal listed in the document is the improvement of "modeling, prediction and information integration" across U.S. agencies to help predict the probability of an asteroid hitting Earth and determine exactly when and where an asteroid could strike. Emergency-management teams like FEMA would use this information to determine the best course of action when preparing for an asteroid strike and dealing with the consequences.

In the third objective, NASA is asked to come up with new ways to deflect an asteroid heading toward Earth. This involves developing technologies for "rapid-response NEO reconnaissance missions," in which a spacecraft could launch toward an Earth-bound asteroid and somehow change the space rock's course so that it no longer posed a threat. NASA had plans to attempt this with the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) in 2021, but the Trump administration scrapped that mission in 2017.

However, ARM was not the only asteroid-deflecting mission NASA had up its sleeve. The agency's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), expected to launch in 2021, will be "our first technology demonstration of the kinetic impact technique to deflect an asteroid," Johnson said, and it will encounter the asteroid system Didymos in 2022.

The focus of the fourth goal outlined in the document is to increase international cooperation to better prepare the rest of the world for the possibility of an asteroid strike — under the leadership of the United States. "This kind of cooperation is really important," said Aaron Miles, a senior policy advisor with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "It's a global hazard that we all face together, and the best way to approach and address that hazard is cooperatively."

To help the rest of the world prepare for an asteroid strike, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is working with the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to "look at what should be the international response to the NEO hazard," Johnson said. This committee created the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) — a group of asteroid-tracking astronomers and observatories around the world — to help facilitate the sharing of observations and other useful data about NEOs.

In the fifth and last objective in the document, the U.S. government is asked to come up with a plan that would go into effect if a large asteroid were found to be hurtling toward Earth — or if one were to crash into our planet with little to no warning. NASA and FEMA have been collaborating on emergency procedures for asteroid impacts since 2010, and the new report calls for the agencies to "strengthen and routinely exercise NEO impact emergency procedures and action protocols."

FEMA's role during an asteroid emergency would involve notifying everyone who might be affected — ideally before the impact occurs — using the same emergency-alert system already in place for notifying the public about weather emergencies and Amber Alerts. As with any other natural disaster in the U.S., FEMA would provide emergency responders and help with the recovery process.

Asteroid-hunting astronomers have already found more than 8,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) measuring at least 460 feet (140 meters) across — large enough to wipe out an entire state if one were to hit the U.S. But asteroids that size make up only one-third of the estimated population of near-Earth asteroids.

Smaller asteroid impacts may be less catastrophic, but they can still cause significant damage. The space rock that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was only 62 feet (19 m) wide, and it injured more than 1,200 people while damaging thousands of buildings as far as 58 miles (93 kilometers) away from the site of impact. NASA is starting to look for more of those smaller asteroids, now that most of the larger ones have already been cataloged.

"NASA and its partners have identified more than 95 percent of all asteroids that are large enough to cause a global catastrophe, and none of those found poses a threat within the century," Miles said during the teleconference. "Effective emergency-response procedures can save lives, and unlike most natural disasters, asteroid impacts are preventable," he added.

"Implementing the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan will greatly increase our nation's readiness … to effectively respond, should a new, potential asteroid impact be detected," Johnson said.

The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan is available to download as a PDF here.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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• Asteroid the size of a city block just gave Earth a close shave</s>WASHINGTON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday, June 20, to discuss a new report detailing U.S. plans for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a hazard to Earth. While no known NEOs currently pose significant risks of impact, the report is a key step to addressing a nationwide response to any future risks.

Titled, "National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan," the document identifies actions to enhance the federal government's coordination and preparedness posture during the next 10 years to address potential hazard posed by NEOs.

To participate, media must email their name and affiliation to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov or call 202-358-0918 by noon June 20.

Audio of the teleconference will stream live at:

To ask questions via social media during the teleconference, use the hashtag #askNASA</s>NASA has just outlined a basic plan of action in case a comet or asteroid is spotted coming toward Earth with the possibility of it colliding with the planet. The preparedness plan involves all Near-Earth Objects (NEO) these are large space rocks that are within 30 million miles of the planet and might strike Earth.

According to a release put out by NASA, there are no known NEOs that pose any significant risk to Earth as of now, but it is an initiative that is key in addressing future risks. The report mentions NASA, along with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other government agencies collaborated on this federal planning document for NEOs.

This programme was summed up in a document that is titled, "The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan," and this paper outlines the plans over the next ten years, says NASA. Efforts related to NEO impacts are important because they are, as the report says, low probability, but high consequence natural disasters.

"The nation already has significant scientific, technical and operational capabilities that are relevant to asteroid impact prevention," said Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defence officer, at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

"Implementing the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan will greatly increase our nation's readiness and work with international partners to effectively respond should a new potential asteroid impact be detected."

NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) regularly maps and publishes orbits of all detected NEOs for everyone to see and understand that there is a potential risk of deep impact.

The space agency is also said to be looking into approaches for deflecting (turning aside) or disrupting (breaking up) asteroids. Earlier this year, NASA unveiled their HAMMER project where asteroids can either be pushed aside and away from Earth impact orbit, or use nuclear weapons to obliterate them. By completing this action plan, the agency along with its governmental partners will start to evaluate and actually begin development of various approaches, HAMMER, or otherwise, including the necessary technologies to defend Earth from a significant asteroid or comet collision, seeing as how there could be a Planet Nine out there firing comets this way.

The paper has put together five strategic goals to reduce risks of NEO impacts. This will be done first through "improved understanding, forecasting, prevention, and emergency preparedness", notes the release. As of now, the five goals are:
• Improve modelling and prediction as well as information integration
• Increase cooperation to prepare for NEOs on an international level
• Establish NEO impact emergency procedures and action protocols in case the possibility of an impact gets real

While that sounds quite movie-like, such events have happened before and will happen again with a 100 percent certainty, say experts. It makes sense to at least be prepared for such an event. It is not clear if this programme will be a part of US President Donald Trump's "Space Force" or not at this time.</s>NASA and a number of US federal agencies have put together a bold planetary defence plan in anticipation of killer asteroids barrelling towards Earth. The Interagency Working Group for Detecting and Mitigating the impacts of Earth-bound Near-Earth Objects, or DAMIEN, drafted an 18-page document on the risks posed by NEOs. The document titled The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan outlines Earth’s preparedness for the next decade. The proposal suggests using nuclear explosives as the “only feasible option” to protect the planet from impact.

NEOs are comets or asteroids attracted to Earth’s gravitational field and potentially headed for impact. NEOs larger than 140 metres in diameter have the potential to cause irreparable damage to entire regions or continents – striking with the power of more than 60 megatons of TNT. Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defence officer, said: “The nation already has significant scientific, technical and operation capabilities that are relevant to asteroid impact prevention. “Implementing the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan will greatly increase our nation’s readiness and work with international partners to effectively respond should a new potential asteroid impact be detected.”

And this year alone, two rogue asteroids slipped past NASA’s radars without anyone noticing. According to the document, improved NEO detection will reduce uncertainty and aid more effective decision making. But the document also encourages all involved to develop technologies capable of disrupting and deflecting NEO asteroids. The report reads: “Preparing to respond effectively to a NEO impact threat scenario includes developing capabilities for both deflection and disruption.

“There is much that is not known about the orbits, size, and material composition of many NEOs, and it is essential to account for these uncertainties when developing and utilising technologies for impact prevention. “For example, multiple technologies may be suitable for preventing NEO impacts that are predicted well in advance, while disruption via nuclear explosive device may be the only feasible option for NEOs that are very large or come with short warning time.” But the report also proposes the use of “kinetic impactors” and “gravity tractors” for asteroid deflection. NASA’s gravity tractor is a proposed space probe capable of slightly altering an asteroid’s path by means of gravitational attraction.</s>In a key step to defend Earth from potentially devastating risks of near-Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids and comets, whose orbits come within 30 million miles of Earth, NASA has released a federal planning document.

The US space agency along with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and several other governmental agencies have collaborated on this federal planning document for NEOs, and have charted five overarching strategic goals to reduce the risk of NEO impacts through improved understanding, forecasting, prevention and emergency preparedness.

The 20-page document, titled “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan” aims to organise and coordinate efforts related to the NEO efforts within the federal government during the next 10 years to ensure that the nation can more effectively respond in case of such an event, which has a low-probability but can bring very high-consequence natural disasters.

“The nation already has significant scientific, technical and operational capabilities that are relevant to asteroid impact prevention,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defence officer said in a statement. “Implementing the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan will greatly increase our nation’s readiness and work with international partners to respond effectively, should a new potential asteroid impact be detected,” Johnson added.

The action plan includes enhancing NEO detection, tracking, and characterisation capabilities; improving NEO modelling prediction, and information integration. It will also develop technologies for NEO deflection and disruption missions, increase international cooperation on NEO preparation, as well as establish NEO impact emergency procedures and action protocol, the statement said.

Achieving these five goals will, for a very modest government endeavour, dramatically increase the nation’s preparedness for addressing the NEO hazard and mitigating any threat, the statement said. NASA has been studying NEOs since the 1970s. The agency initiated its impact hazard mitigation efforts with a project commonly called “Spaceguard” in the late 1990s to begin to search for them.

NASA now participates as a key member in both the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) and the asteroid Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group, endorsed by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN-COPUOS) as the combined response for all space-capable nations to address the NEO impact hazard. To better organise US efforts, NASA also established the Planetary Defence Coordination Office in 2016. To date, NASA-sponsored NEO surveys have provided over 95 per cent of all NEO discoveries.</s>We don't actually have a lot to be afraid of when it comes to asteroids. Sure, they might come pretty close from time to time, but they tend to buzz harmlessly by - after all, Earth is a pretty tiny target in the vastness of space.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared, though - and NASA, along with several other US federal agencies, has been putting together a contingency plan.

They've called the collective the Interagency Working Group for Detecting and Mitigating the Impact of Earth-bound Near-Earth Objects, or DAMIEN, which isn't ominous at all, and released a 20-page document that outlines the asteroid - or near-Earth object (NEO) - plans for the next decade.

"The nation already has significant scientific, technical and operation capabilities that are relevant to asteroid impact prevention," said NASA planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson.

"Implementing the National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan will greatly increase our nation's readiness and work with international partners to effectively respond should a new potential asteroid impact be detected."

The plan is based on a set of strategy goals in 2016, and hopes to do something about a huge problem with our asteroid preparedness: we're actually really bad at detecting them.

This year alone we've had two surprise asteroids appear in our vicinity. Admittedly, both were smaller than the 140-metre (460-foot) size that is officially considered potentially hazardous (although a smaller one could still do a lot of damage).

But we're pretty bad at spotting those, too - we've only detected about 8,000 to date, an estimated third of what's out there. And there's a limit to what we can do right now.

"According to a 2017 report from NASA's NEO Science Definition Team," the White House document says, "current observational capabilities are suited to only finding less than half of all 140-metre objects by 2033."

Now for the good news: The group knows that's a problem, and it's working to fix it by improving our current detection, tracking and asteroid characterisation capabilities.

"If a real threat does arise, we are prepared to pull together the information about what options might work and provide that information to decision-makers," Johnson said in a press conference.

That's the first part of a five-part approach. Two others are improving asteroid modelling and prediction, and establishing international cooperation, which makes sense - asteroids don't really care about our boundaries.

Then there's what to do if an asteroid does pose a threat. NASA actually has some pretty good strategies in place for this, since asteroid Bennu, around 492 metres (1,614 feet) wide, could be on a collision course with Earth in 2135 CE.

If that does look like it's going to happen, a rocket carrying nukes may be sent up to intercept. If the impact didn't send Bennu careening into space, a bomb detonated near the asteroid would evaporate a part of it, which would act as a sort of thruster to send the asteroid off in another direction.

NASA will be testing the kinetic impact redirection method in 2021, with its Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

Other potential methods involve using nukes to blow asteroids to much less hazardous smithereens; or putting a heavy spacecraft near the asteroid. This gravity spacecraft would, theoretically, tug on the asteroid, pulling it off its collision course.

NASA, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Department of Defense will be working together on preliminary designs for potential deflection missions, and start conducting flight demonstrations on harmless near-Earth objects in the vicinity to improve defection and gravity tractor techniques.

The final part of the plan is for the worst case scenario - emergency and disaster procedures for if a large asteroid does hit Earth.

"When implemented, the activities outlined herein will improve detection, research, mission planning, emergency preparedness and response, and domestic and international engagement," the document says.

"Implementing the NEO Action Plan will increase the United States' ability and readiness, together with domestic and international partners, to mitigate the impact hazard posed by NEOs."

We feel … well, just about as safe as we ever did, to be honest.

You can read the full report here.</s>WASHINGTON: NASA’s office of communications hosted a media teleconference today to announce the release of a new report from The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The report, titled the Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan, outlines procedures to help the federal government ready itself to deal with objects that could potentially collide with earth (NEOs) over the next 10 years. The report is available here:

The five goals outlined in the report:
The United States government releases a Near-Earth Object Preparedness Plan for reducing risks of asteroid or comet impacts.