Blasting report for the NASA's asteroid protection program

Dear readers and followers,

NASA's effort to identify potentially dangerous space rocks has taken a hit. On Monday, the space agency's inspector general released a report blasting NASA's Near Earth Objects program, which is meant to hunt and catalog comets, asteroids and relatively large fragments of these objects that pass within 17.5 million kilometers of Earth. The purpose is to protect the planet against their potential dangers. 

Most near-Earth objects harmlessly disintegrate before reaching Earth's surface. But there are exceptions, like the nearly 20 meters meteor that exploded over Russia in 2013, causing considerable damage. For this reason +NASA decided to propose a reward of 35 k€ for an asteroid hunter software.

Credit image: NASA

In a 44 pages report, Inspector General Paul Martin said the Near Earth Objects program needs to be better organized and managed, with a bigger staff. NASA's science mission chief, former astronaut John Grunsfeld, agreed and promised the problems will be fixed. "NASA places a high priority on finding and characterizing hazardous asteroids to protect our home planet from them" he said in a statement. According to the report, the program has an executive at NASA headquarters and two offices in Massachusetts and California, each with six employees. For nearly a decade, the report noted, NASA has been tracking near-Earth objects bigger than 150 meters across. The goal was to catalog 90 percent by 2020.

The space agency has discovered and plotted the orbits of more than 11,000 near-Earth objects since 1998, an estimated 10 percent. It does not expect to meet the 2020 deadline. The program has insufficient oversight, Martin's office concluded, and no established milestones to track progress. In addition, NASA needs to do a better job of overseeing the various observatories searching for near-Earth objects, and teaming up with other U.S. and international agencies, the report said.

Source: NASA

Remember that this blog is free, but you can support us with Flattr

Stay tuned

NASA proposes a reward of 35 k$ for an asteroid hunter software

Dear followers and readers,

the danger for the Earth planet induced by hazardous asteroids is a field which interests strongly all the space agency. NASA is used to detect, track and characterizes space comets and hazardous asteroids. A dedicated program called Near-Earth Object Observation, also named Spaceguard has been created by the space agency in order to present dramatic event. For this reason +NASA decided to propose a reward of 35 k€ for an asteroid hunter software.

During the three months of 2014, couple hazardous asteroids passed close to Earth such as the asteroid called 2014 DX110 last week. This asteroid was quite small, around 30 meters of diameter. However, in February 2014, an other wider asteroid was observed close to Earth, 2000 EM26: this one was really wide, around 270 meters of diameter, the equivalent of 3 football field.

With the number of asteroids growing, the US space agency would mine the talent from the general public. NASA hopes to spot dangerous space rocks such as the one that saw off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. In order to increase the interest of people, NASA is offering up to $35,000 over the next six months to anyone who is able develop computer code that can identify life-threatening asteroids.

The challenge started by NASA consists in developing significantly improved algorithms to identify asteroids in images captured by ground-based telescopes.
"The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computer systems" defined NASA.

Stay tuned and try your chance to save Earth !