NASA plans to launch telescope to find potentially Earth-threatening asteroids

NASA will place a telescope in space at the earliest in six years to detect many of the asteroids orbiting the sun near Earth. Those objects can potentially hit the Earth, some of which are seen as dangerous.

Thomas Zurbuchen, the Swiss-American deputy director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, indicated at a meeting in the United States that the so-called NEO Surveillance Mission is a priority, Ars Technica writes. The telescope will be launched no earlier than 2025 and will cost less than $600 million.

According to Zurbuchen, the telescope will discover 65 percent of undiscovered asteroids 140 meters or more in diameter within five years, and that should increase to 90 percent after ten years. Boulders or objects with a diameter of 140 meters or larger can in any case cause enormous destruction in the region of impact and are therefore seen as potentially dangerous.

Zurbuchen said he has negotiated funding for this project with the White House and Congress. The money for the mission will come from the budget that NASA spends on finding and categorizing dangerous objects. $150 million is spent annually on this; that amount will have to be increased to finance the NEO Surveillance Mission.

According to Richard Binzel, an asteroid expert at MIT, the mission means “we’re finally going to rely on knowledge rather than luck when it comes to a plan for dealing with dangerous asteroids.” The ESA has now identified 879 near-earth asteroids that, according to estimates, have a greater than zero chance of impacting Earth. These NEAs or NEOs are objects where their course takes them within 1.3AU from the sun. According to the ESA, of the more than 600,000 known asteroids in our solar system, more than 20,000 are classified as NEO.

The NEO Surveillance Mission isn’t the only mission that orbits asteroids orbiting near Earth. In 2021, a spacecraft is due to be launched and headed for the binary asteroid Didymos, to make the smaller of the two change direction by colliding with it at high speed. This Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, or Dart, is a collaboration with the ESA, after which a European probe will be launched to map the impact on Didymos.