Speaking at the Planetary Defense Conference in Washington, D.C., NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine warned that the risk posed by meteor crashes was not being taken seriously.
"This is not about Hollywood, this is not about movies, this is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know right now to host life," he said.
Bridenstine pointed to the meteorite that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013, which had "30 times the energy of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima" and injured around 1,500 people. Just 16 hours after the crash, NASA detected an even larger object that approached the earth but did not land on it, he revealed.
"I wish I could tell you that these events are exceptionally unique, but they are not," Bridenstine said. "These events are not rare - they happen. It's up to us to make sure that we are characterizing, detecting, tracking all of the near-Earth objects that could be a threat to the world."
According to scientific modeling systems, such events are expected to happen once every 60 years - but Bridenstine pointed out that destructive meteorites had crashed on the earth three times in the last century.
In 2018, the White House published an action plan that required NASA to detect, track and characterize 90 percent of near-Earth objects measuring 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter - but Bridenstine admitted on Monday that the space agency had a long way to go to meet that goal.
"We're only about a third of the way there," he said. "We want more international partners that can join us in this effort. We want more systems on the face of the Earth that can detect and track these objects, and we want to be able to feed all of that data into one single operating system so that ultimately, we have the best, most accurate data that we can possibly get."
Bridenstine warned that failing to invest in such a network could have catastrophic consequences.
"(At 140 meters) it's big enough to destroy a state in the United States of America," he said. "It's big enough to destroy an entire European country."
"We know for a fact that the dinosaurs did not have a space program," he added. "But we do, and we need to use it."
Earlier this month, NASA awarded a contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX that will see the company provide launch services for the agency's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The $69 million mission, expected to launch in 2021, will test the earth's capability of deflecting an asteroid by colliding a spacecraft with it at high speed.
Comment: It's so obvious, NASA is saying it outright. But instead trillion$ are wasted on geopolitical power games and social engineering...
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HYPOTHETICAL COMET IMPACT SCENARIO - PDC 2019 NASA - April 29–May 3, 2019
A hypothetical comet impact scenario has been prepared for use at the 2019 IAA Planetary Defense Conference (PDC), to be held in College Park, Maryland, USA, April 29 - May 3, 2019. This scenario is for a long- period comet and is NOT part of the main 2019 PDC impact scenario, which will be presented as a hypothetical asteroid impact exercise at the 2019 PDC. As with other recent PDC scenarios, this comet scenario is technically realistic in many ways, but is completely fictional and does NOT describe an actual potential comet impact. The scenario begins as follows:
1.The orbital period of the comet is calculated to be several thousand years , which puts it in the category of a long-period comet (LPC)
2. .C/2019 PDC’s perhelion (closest point to the Sun) is calculated to be 0.92 au, well within the Earth’s orbit. The famous long-period comet C/Hale-Bopp had a similar perihelion distance. As is typical with long-period comets, the orbit is highly inclined to the plane of the solar system. In fact, the orbit of C/2019 PDC has an inclination of 129 degrees, making it retrograde.
3. The calculated orbit of C/2019 PDC very nearly intersects the orbit of the Earth, and initial orbit predictions indicate that the comet will make a very close approach to Earth in late February 2021, only 22 months away.
4. When first discovered, C/2019 PDC is far away, roughly 8 au from Earth, almost as far away as the planet Saturn. The comet is moving towards the inner solar system at a modest speed of about 15 kilometers per second, but that speed is predicted to increase dramatically as the comet approaches the Sun, reaching a speed relative to the Earth at close approach of roughly 65 km/s.
5. Further complicating orbit predictions are the so-called non-gravitational accelerations caused by cometary outgassing.
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Vulcan forms comet swarms in 3:2 resonances with period. Every time Vulcan orbits twice, the comet swarms orbit three (unequal) times. Thus:
a. The comets orbital period = 9938/3 ~ 3313 +/- few hundred years.
b. Vulcan's inclination is 48.44deg. The inclination of the comet swarms are cranked up or down several degrees depending where Vulcan is relative to the comet's location (which changes with every orbital rotation).
c. If the comet swarm's orbits are posigrade, their inclination should be 48.44deg +/- several degrees.
d. If their orbital rotation is retrograde, their inclination should be 180deg - 48.44deg = 131.56 degrees +/- several degrees .
e. The speed of Vulcan's comets relative to the Earth at close approach is assumed to be 70 km/sec.
f. Thus, NASA's theoretical C/2019 PDC comet and Vulcan's comets are very similar in terms of both period, inclination and speed relative to Earth.
DOUBLE ASTEROID REDIRECTION TEST (DART) MISSION NASA - May 8, 2019
The DART spacecraft launch window begins in late July 2021. DART will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. After separation from the launch vehicle and over a year of cruise it will intercept Didymos’ moonlet in late September 2022, when the Didymos system is within 11 million kilometers of Earth, enabling observations by ground-based telescopes and planetary radar to measure the change in momentum imparted to the moonlet.
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The B Comet Swarm:
Several diverse sources have suggested that a catastrophic celestial impact events may occur in Earth's near future...
Future impact events may well occur that could cause blast, tsunamis', and a major weather change resulting in a new Younger Dryas like Ice Age...
Impacts in the Atlantic ocean, Caribbean and Mediterranean sea are anticipated. Peak threat times are September/October 2022 or maybe 2023...
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2017 Significant Events:
Meteorite Induced New Hampshire (04 Oct. 2017) and California (08 Oct. 2017) Wild Fires.
What we have learned in the last few weeks is that the NEO office that is supposed to track asteroids knows little about them. It seems likely they have no program for searching the heavens and may depend on the many observatories informing them.