Planetary safetyPanSTARRS project to track near-Earth objects continued

Published 15 May 2009

The U.S. Congress required that U.S. government organizations should make an effort to help locate and catalog all space objects larger than 1 kilometer in size which might hit the planet; the U.S. Air Force makes its contribution through the PanSTARR project

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate at Kirkland AFB, New Mexico, recently entered into a cooperative effort with the University of Hawaii of Honolulu, Hawaii, under the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS) multi-year program. DID reports that PanSTARRS will address numerous science applications ranging from the structure of the Solar System to the properties of the Universe of the largest scales. It will also be able to detect and catalog large numbers of earth-orbit crossing asteroids, or near earth objects (NEO) that present a potential threat to mankind. That last component to the mission is especially intriguing, as there is a long history of partial efforts in this direction within the United States and elsewhere. Where does this award fit in?

The PanSTARRS project, according to DID, quoting official spokesmen, is not an air force mission as such to protect the Earth from asteroid strike. The U.S. Congress, however, has said that American government organizations should make an effort to help locate and catalog all space objects larger than 1 kilometer in size which might hit the planet, and, Lewis Page writes, this seems to have been enough to keep the PanSTARRS effort going. Kilometer-plus asteroids are large enough that such an impact might seriously threaten human civilization, or even (in the case of really large asteroids) humanity’s existence.

Astronomers at the University of Hawaii say that:

Pan-STARRS should quickly help finish off the Congressional mandate [and] will be able to push the detection limit for a complete (99%) sample down to objects as small as 300-meters in diameter. Such objects, while not capable of wiping out life on Earth, would cause considerable local and/or regional damage should one collide with our planet.

Even if all the Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and ordinary asteroid-belt boulders of planet-busting size have been nailed down, humanity can not relax. There might be Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), or comets, with tremendously long orbital periods — perhaps only plunging into the inner system to menace Earth every century or so. Still, says Page, cataloging all the nearer and more visible objects would eliminate a big portion of the risk, so we should be grateful to the USAF raygun specialists and their Hawaiian telescope project.