Asteroid Impacts on Earth Obstructed by Red Tape

Artist's view of last year’s fireball explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia – termed a "superbolide" event.

Credit: Don Davis

Red tape is making it tougher for researchers to study and characterize asteroid strikes on Earth, which are apparently more common than previously thought, experts say.

The bureaucratic snafu affects the use of U.S. government space assets that help scientists study "airbursts" like the meteor that exploded without warning over Russia last year.

At issue is the ability to combine space data with outputs from a global network of seismic, infrasound and hydroacoustic sensors that have been deployed worldwide to provide treaty verification for a nuclear test ban.

This network is the International Monitoring System (IMS) overseen by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).

In recent years, the IMS has detected shock waves from many airbursts, providing further evidence that asteroid impacts are more frequent than previously thought.

Ideally, matching observations from spacecraft with measurements from CTBTOs infrasound detectors would give scientists more of a heads-up on what's raining down on Earth, experts say.



Memorandum of agreement
Last year, the Air Force Space Command signed a memorandum of agreement with NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

That document, inked on Jan. 18, 2013, spelled out specifics for the public release of meteor data from sources such as high-flying, secretive U.S. government space sensors.

With that agreement in place, NASA's Near Earth Object (NEO) Observation Program started receiving information on fireball events based on analysis of data collected by U.S. government sensors.

Details of atmospheric meteor explosions, as recorded by U.S. military spacecraft sensors, were posted on a publicly accessible NASA website run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

In fact, the military-civil cooperation was spurred by the details of the February 2013 fireball explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, termed a "superbolide" event.

The website postings are designed to assist the scientific community's investigation of bolides, or exceptionally bright fireballs.

However, multiple scientists noted that the JPL website had not been updated recently. That presumably meant that there was some sort of delay, as some fairly big events were detected by infrasound in the last year.

"Because of budget and personnel reductions on our military partner, they ran into workforce issues to accomplish this task," said Lindley Johnson, NEO program executive within the Planetary Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.

"We are already in discussions with them about what it will take to get it restarted," Johnson told reporters

Astronauts to reveal sobering data on large asteroid impacts

The Sentinel Space Telescope in orbit around the Sun. 

Credit: Ball Aerospace.

This Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22, three former NASA astronauts will present new evidence that our planet has experienced many more large-scale asteroid impacts over the past decade than previously thought; three to ten times more, in fact.

A new visualization of data from a nuclear weapons warning network, to be unveiled by B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu during the evening event at Seattle's Museum of Flight, shows that "the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a 'city-killer' sized asteroid is blind luck."


Since 2001, 26 atomic-bomb-scale explosions have occurred in remote locations around the world, far from populated areas, made evident by a nuclear weapons test warning network.

In a recent press release B612 Foundation CEO Ed Lu states:

"This network has detected 26 multi-kiloton explosions since 2001, all of which are due to asteroid impacts. It shows that asteroid impacts are NOT rare, but actually 3-10 times more common than we previously thought."

"The fact that none of these asteroid impacts shown in the video was detected in advance is proof that the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a 'city-killer' sized asteroid is blind luck." 

"The goal of the B612 Sentinel mission is to find and track asteroids decades before they hit Earth, allowing us to easily deflect them."

The B612 Foundation is partnered with Ball Aerospace to build the Sentinel Space Telescope Mission.

Once positioned in solar orbit closer to the Sun from Earth, Sentinel will look outwards in infrared to detect hundreds of thousands of as-yet unknown near-Earth objects over 140 meters in size.

The privately-funded spacecraft is slated to launch in 2017-18 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

In addition to Lu, Space Shuttle astronaut Tom Jones and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders will be speaking at the event, titled "Saving the Earth by Keeping Big Asteroids Away"

The event will be held at 6 p.m. PDT at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA.

It is free to the public and the visualization will be made available online on the B612 Foundation website.