The US space agency has announced that it plans to build a state of the art infrared telescope that could detect asteroids on a collision course with Earth. The new defence system could be functional in the next 10 years, according to Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science.
Known as the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission, it will cost $500million (£402million) to $600million (£482million) to construct, along with specifically calibrations and engineering logistics.
The telescope, however, is not that new of an idea to NASA and its workers, having been proposed some 15 years ago.
First proposed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, such telescope is essential for meeting a congressional requirement that NASA detect 90 percent of all potentially hazardous asteroids and comets of at least 140 meters in diameter by the end of 2020.
Though the telescope will inevitably end up with a different name given the length of time it will take to construct, Mark Sykes, CEO of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona explained that the mission will always stay the same.
Space agency in groundbreaking move toward asteroid detection to save humanity (Image: GETTY)
Infrared telescopes can spot asteroids invisible to light (Image: GETTY)
He said: “There is no independent or new spacecraft or operational design here. This mission is NEOCam.”
However, because NASA estimate the telescope’s construction to be in the next 10 years, the agency will thus not meet congresses requirement by 2020.
But, the combination of the prospect of an infrared telescope combined with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a ground-based facility being built in Chile, will eventually ramp-up Earths asteroid defences and turn the current goals into reality.
And, the mission is unlikely to be abandoned or backlogged, as an infrared telescope,r researchers say, is essential because of the past decades having shown that dark asteroids – nearly invisible to light – stand out in infrared and are more abundant than once thought.
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Satellites across the Us and South America are being erected in a bid to detect asteroids (Image: GETTY)
Jay Melosh, a planetary scientist at Purdue University, claimed: “There are a lot of really dark asteroids out there and that pushes the need for the infrared system.”
The telescope could demand an increase in NASAs current $150million (£120million) annual budget for planetary defence systems.
Most of the money goes to the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission being built by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
Set for completion by 2021, DART seeks to test the possibility of deflecting the path of an asteroid as oppose to destroying it.
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The satellites are often built on massive scales and take up huge amounts of land (Image: GETTY)
Infrared imaging allows for previously invisible aspects of the sky come to life (Image: GETTY)
It is unclear whether the US congress appropriators will follow NASA’s lead – neither is it clear if the US congress will approve funding for the infrared telescope.
Though funding is a big question in the advancement of the agency’s defence systems, the mission does mark a developmental step towards NASA taking an external groups proposal and adapting it for its internal work.
The proposal could see Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, return.
Ms Mainzer has been crucial to the progress of infrared technologies within astronomy, and led NEOCam since it was first proposed.
Asteroids are always hurtling towards the Earth (Image: Express Newspapers)
She told Science Mag: “I’m hearing the news at the same time as everyone else.
“It sounds like NASA is interested in pursuing this, which I think is great – it’s a problem worth solving.”
Over the past 15 years, with NASA support, Mainzer’s team has refined the electronics and sensors that will power the telescope.
Not everyone is a fan of the telescope and NASA’s plans, with Nathan Myhrvold, a billionaire technologist and former Microsoft chief technology officer, claiming the technology the telescope would support is skewed and not entirely accurate.
NASA has to fund several missions and expeditions alongside asteroid defence (Image: GETTY)
Mr Myhrvold faulted the statistics used by Mainz and others to generate asteroid diameters.
Among other issues faced by NASA in its advancement is debate among scientists and congress over what asteroid size constitutes a danger to the Earth.
Researchers now think asteroids smaller than 140 meters in diameter also pose potentially serious threats to Earth, in part because they could generate damaging tsunamis.