On Thursday (May 15), the Space, Science and Technology Committee of the US House of Representatives. Uu. It was an especially prudent issue given the entire scandal for asteroid 2024 years4, which had a notable possibility of heating our planet before scientists refined their position and considered it harmless.
Most of the conversation on Thursday surrounded the highly expected mission of object topographs near the Earth (NEO), which Sich should greatly improve the hazardous asteroid detection capabilities as a whole. However, there were also many efforts to address the elephant in the room: the recently announced intention of the Trump Administration of OBLICUA BAR NASA’s first line financing in 24% for the next fiscal year. The cutting of agency science programs, which includes its planetary defense work, is simply deeper, with 47%.
Outlined In the “Flaca Budget Proposal” of the White House, as it is called, the reduction of the upper line would be the “largest one -year court for NASA in the history of the United States.”
“If promulgated, the Trump administration’s thin budget proposal runs the risk of putting NASA on the road to irrelevance,” said representative Valerie Foushee (D-North Carolina) during the audience. “Our economic and national security threatens, we give us leadership and space to our adversaries, and endangers our competitiveness and position on the world scenario. That is a strategic position that I simply cannot accept.”
What is Neo Surveyor?
The Neo Surveyor mission is the first space telescope that will be dedicated to locating asteroids that could threaten the Earth, says NASA. It is the next great step of the agency to increase the planetary defense game of the Nation, which was really taken to the avant -garde for the public in 2022 with the Dart mission.
Dart, which represents the double asteroid redirection test, sent a spacecraft to crush in an asteroid called Dimorpohos. Dimorphos orbit a larger asteroid, called Didymos. Neither of them threatened us, to be clear, since this was just a proof of concept. The objective was to see if this impact would adjust the trajectory of Dimorphos around Didymos; If so, it would suggest that a spacecraft can one day be sent to a real theater asteroid to eliminate a potential collision course with the earth. Dart worked wonderfully, but I could use some help.
Neo Surveyor is more a prophylactic measure for planetary defense. It will be what the asteroid see in which I wanted to break a future dart ship.
“We do not know any considerable object that has a significant risk of affecting the land in the next 100 years; however, there is much more to find,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of the NASA scientific mission direction, Duration The Charing.
“The mission will improve NASA’s ability to discover and then define the sizes and orbits of the neos to understand the danger we make for us,” he added. “Finding these potential dangerous asteroids remains a priority for NASA’s planetary defense program.”
One of the most promising aspects of Neo Surveyor is the fact that neo can identify through infrared detection. Infrared wavelengths are not visible to human eyes and most human technologies; They are a habitual thought or as heat firms. Firefighters, for example, can use infrared wavelengths to understand the distribution of fire in a flame building.
This detection strategy should produce a higher objective rate compared to traditional methods, which are usually based on whether sunlight is reflected in a neo. In fact, a problem was illustrated with the purely confidence of sunlight for neo hunting with Chelyabinsk asteroid that exploded over Russia in 2013, which Damaged many buildings and injured more than 1,000 people.
“The explosion released the energy equivalent to approximately 440 kilotons of TNT, more than 30 times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb, breaking windows, hurting thousands and causing millions of dollars in damage to property. For terrestrial telescopes and is not believed,” representative. Brian Babin (R-Texas), who currently serves as president of the Committee on Space, Science and Technology of the House of Representatives, said the audience.
He thought that Neo Surveyor still won to be able to detect a possible dangerous asteroid that comes directly from the direction of the Sun, will allow observations of super-close neos, Fox said.
“It will help us find the objects, including the dark fraction of the population, which we believe is approximately 35 to 40% of the population,” Amy Mainzer, principal researcher of the Neo Surveyor mission and professor at the University of California in California. “It will also help us to measure sizes, because we can quickly turn infrared flows into a diameter as soon as we get an orbit of the center of minor planets … That is such an important component for impact energy.”
“We monitor the orbits of the 38,000 neo currently known, including the more than two of two thousand potentially dangerous, and an impact of any of those engines is devastating,” Matthew Payne, Saint the Leaf.
Fox said Neo Surveyor should be ready to launch by 2028, maybe before, but that is, of course, assuming that the mission obtains the financing it needs.
What happens later?
“Password documents”, a kind of prior view of the 2026 Budget request of the White House, suggested that the proposition cuts Could lead to closure Or NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The possibility of closing a key agency research center worries scientists, and the audience of duration arose.
He was asked, theoretically, Fox, what would happen if NASA’s AMES Research Center in Silicon Valley, who plays a vital role in planetary defense, closed.
“YEAH [NASA Ames] They were no longer able to do the evaluation, what we would lose is really the ability to give our type of advice of early experts to [the Federal Emergency Management Agency]That is now an answer to decide where the perimeter is and what is the answer to protect as much human life, “Fox said.
Payne said that, at present, the minor planets center has not been affected by proposed cuts; Mainzer said he is not sure how the cuts could affect Neo Surveyor’s operations. He also emphasized how expensive train scientists like her to lead such an important mission.
“We really have to have the investment and the time that science takes to learn, in order to do it well,” said Mainzer.
Fox echoed uncertainty, answering almost all questions about Trump’s skinny budget with the answer that meets to see the final budget before reaching conclusions. “We expect the president’s full budget so that we can see the priorities in the direction in which the missions can be supported or not supported,” he said.
“It is clear that planetary defense takes advantage of many of our federals [science and technology] Agencies Now, if that federal agency continues, if that experience continues, I think, it is now in question, “said representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) during the audience. Other orders instigated by Trump, such as the generalized layoffs of test employees and deferred renunciation programs, are creating a” brain drainage, “he added.
Recent executive orders, for example, have seen the rapid federal layoffs of 800 workers in the Oceanic and Atmospheric National Administration (NOAA) that monitor natural disasters such as hurricanes and forecast daily climatic patterns. The deferred resignation program is a kind of indirect way to fire employees, Offering payment Until a certain month if they leave on your own.
“A very reasonable question is whether NASA should, in fact, spend more money on the monitoring and defense of asteroids given the catastrophic risk for our country and civilization,” Representative George Whitesides (D-California) said during the audience, which used to work in NASA in a leadership position. “As several members have already mentioned, our leadership in this area, such as so many areas of land space and science, are now threatened by the cuts proposed to NASA’s budget, as well as the budgets of other agencies.”
“We are talking about impacts that can eliminate a complete region, bring waste to a country or devastate the planet. And, you know, this is something we can do something, in reality, this is a job that is 100% saturated with Pevla.”
Or note, the representative Foushee asked both Payne and Mainzer how much neo could improve if artificial intelligence could be implemented in the workflow. Both agreed that training systems would lead to more precise and faster results, but when Foushee asked how much financing it would be necessary for realistic performance, the question was deferred for Fox. “Proper financing is certainly important,” Fox said.
Exactly how our planetary defense strategies can be affected by the details of the Trump budget, which have not yet been published. (And Congress still has to act and act a budget, which remains a proposal until that happens). If the White House really reduces funds for these efforts, Fox said NASA can trust global partners for dangerous neo.
“If we cannot unite in a large part of the planet, what are we going to join?” Fox said.
