Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Archive for April, 2020

 

A few days ago, the Department of Defense (DOD) authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, which have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017.

The U.S. Navy previously acknowledged that these videos circulating in the public domain were indeed Navy videos.

 

Air space incursions

From an April 27 statement by the DoD: “After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Furthermore, the statement explains that “DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos.”

 

 

“Historical” Navy videos

The aerial phenomena observed in the videos, the DoD statement on the “Release of Historical Navy Videos” concludes, “remain characterized as “unidentified.”

 

 

 

The released videos can be found at the Naval Air Systems Command Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Reading Room: https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/documents

Debunking the videos

But for all you unidentified aerial phenomena followers, take note of the work of Mick West. He describes himself as a debunker, skeptic, writer, along with being a former video game programmer. He is author of the book: Escaping the Rabbit Hole – How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories using Facts, Logic, and Respect.

West has released a video called “Explained: New Navy UFO Videos” – and it is well worth viewing.

West has assessed the trio of videos, called FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST.

Likely explanations

“With the help of others, I quickly arrived at likely explanations for all three videos,” West explains. “The FLIR video is most likely a distant plane. The video was taken well after the famous encounter with a hypersonic zig-zagging tic-tac by pilots from the Nimitz [aircraft carrier]. This object doesn’t actually move on screen – except when the camera moves, and it resembles an out of focus low-resolution backlit plane. I don’t know what the pilots saw, but this video does not show anything really interesting.”

The GIMBAL video is also probably of a plane, West continues. “It’s not rotating. What you see is the infrared glare of the engines, larger than the plane. It looks like it is rotating because of an artifact of the gimbal-mounted camera system.” As for the “AURA” around the plane, that’s just image sharpening, he adds. “It happens all the time in thermal camera footage. It’s not an alien warp drive, it’s just the unsharp mask filter.”

Lastly, the GO-FAST video probably shows a balloon, West surmises. “It’s not moving fast, it’s not skimming the water, and you can verify this yourself because all the information you need is in the numbers on screen. It’s just an effect caused by parallax,” he concludes.

To view Mick West’s “Explained: New Navy UFO Videos” go to:

NASA’s Mars exploration program is in calamitous straits. Proposed reductions in the President’s fiscal year 2021 budget may well pull the plug on the ensemble of veteran orbiters and the space agency’s only active Mars rover, Curiosity. That off-world machinery has been on the red planet prowl since early August 2012.

If unchanged, the budget numbers would close out a working relay/science orbiter, Mars Odyssey, this calendar year. It would also cripple Curiosity’s investigations just as it reaches the sulfate zone on Mt. Sharp in Gale Crater. The dollar shortfall would close out the rover’s work late next year, before it can explore a major climate transition recorded in the rocks higher on the mount.

Science floor

Furthermore, the FY’21 budget reduces by 20 percent the science sleuthing of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), cutting in half the number of targeted observations it can execute, purging most of the special data products associated with them. MRO is a dual-purpose orbiter providing zoom lens inspection of future landing sites and can relay data from surface missions back to Earth.

 

 

 

Lastly, another budget casualty would be the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, reducing that mission to its “science floor” even as it observes Sun-Mars interactions and the planet’s resulting atmospheric loss to space over the rising half of the solar cycle.

For more information on this topic, please read my new Scientific American article:

Mars Needs Money: White House Budget Could Prompt Retreat from Red Planet – Proposed cuts could end decades of U.S. leadership in exploring that world

By Leonard David on April 30, 2020

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mars-needs-money-white-house-budget-could-prompt-retreat-from-red-planet/

 

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now working Sol 2748 tasks.

Mars researchers are planning the rover’s activities at the next planned drill site, Reports Sean Czarnecki, a planetary geologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

That plan is to gather science data about the site before drilling “Glasgow.”

“This is very similar to what a field geologist on Earth would do,” Czarnecki notes.

Before gathering a sample, geologists must first: Determine what rock they want to sample, find the best location for sample collection, and record all relevant field observations/data in a standard field notebook.

Drill campaign

Despite the closest human geologist being over 115 million miles (186 million kilometers) away, “our curious little robotic geologist has all the tools necessary to do a similar assessment on Mars (with a little help from some humans on Earth). In the case of Curiosity’s current drill campaign, we had already determined which rock type we wanted to sample for this drill campaign and identified and drove to the location where the best sample could be obtained,” Czarnecki notes.

In a recent plan, the robot’s Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam), Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), and Mastcam are measuring the composition of the drill target Glasgow, and its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) is slated to take images of this target before and after removing dust in order to document the rock surface prior to drilling.

Atmospheric chemistry

ChemCam will also target “Dalmellington Burns,” “George Square,” and “Large Island” for additional geochemical context of the drill area, Czarnecki explains, while Mastcam documents each of these targets with images.

 

Curiosity’s APXS will also look to the sky to measure atmospheric chemistry.

Additionally, Mastcam will take a 360° mosaic, the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) and the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) will provide remote sensing measurements of the atmospheric and subsurface environment, and Navcam will search for atmospheric dust, clouds and dust devils.

 

Concludes Czarnecki: “That should be enough data to satisfy any geologist!”

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a new report: NASA: Assessments of Major Projects.

This is the GAO’s 12th annual look at the status of NASA’s major projects, finding that costs grew for the third year in a row. “NASA’s acquisition management is on our High Risk List,” the GAO observes.

According to the GAO report, expect to see cost increases and schedule delays for major programs to get worse. “For example, delays are likely for the Artemis I mission, NASA’s next step in returning astronauts to the moon in 2024. NASA is also planning other lunar-related efforts that will become major projects. These efforts are complex and could face significant cost increases and schedule delays.”

This new GAO report provides snapshot profiles of 24 of NASA’s major projects.

Mars 2020

For example, the just-issued report looks at the Mars 2020 project, noting it has encountered development cost growth of almost $360 million, which exceeds the 15 percent congressional notification threshold at a critical point in the development process when problems are most commonly found and schedules tend to slip. This cost growth was due to multiple development difficulties, delayed deliveries, and higher than anticipated procurement costs.

 

As of February 2020, the rover had shipped to Kennedy Space Center to begin preparing for July-August launch, the majority of the project’s flight hardware had been delivered and many of the project’s top technical risks were closed. However, the project is tracking a risk that components of its most complex development—the Sample and Caching Subsystem—could be late.

Performance: expected to worsen

Overall, what the GAO found is that NASA’s portfolio of major projects continued to experience significant cost and schedule growth this year and the performance is expected to worsen.

Since GAO last reported on the portfolio in May 2019, cost growth was approximately 31 percent over project baselines—the third consecutive year that cost growth has worsened after a period of decline. The average launch delay was 12 months, compared to 13 months last year.

“GAO has made a number of recommendations over the last 5 years to improve NASA’s acquisition of major projects. NASA has implemented changes in response to many of these recommendations, although 17 recommendations have not yet been fully addressed. NASA generally agreed with the findings in this report,” states the GAO.

For the full report, go to:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/706505.pdf

For a quick look of findings, go to:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/706507.pdf

Lastly, go to this GAO podcast on the report at:

https://www.gao.gov/multimedia/podcast/706474

 

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now carrying out Sol 2747 duties.

Next stop for the rover is a new drill site dubbed “Glasgow”, reports Roger Wiens, a geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The Curiosity rover is about 66 feet (20 meters) lower in elevation than its highest point near the “Edinburgh” drill hole. With the commands recently uplinked, the rover should arrive at the Glasgow candidate drill site.

Clay-bearing unit

“The purpose of this drill location is to sample the fractured intermediate unit, which is the last major (known) geological unit left to be sampled in the clay-bearing unit that Curiosity has been exploring over the last roughly 440 sols,” Wiens says.

“The team has selected the name ‘Glasgow’ for this candidate drill site. Glasgow is the name of the largest city in Scotland. For trivia buffs, this is to be the fourth drill site starting with a “G,” after “Greenhorn” (silica alteration site, Sol 1137) and “Glen Etive 1 and 2” (drilled earlier in the clay-bearing unit, sols 2486 and 2527),” Wiens adds.

Two-sol plan

Mars scientists have built a two-sol plan (Sols 2747-2748) including a 4×4 Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) raster on target “Troon” and a 1×10 raster on “Buttery.”

Mastcam will take images of those two targets, Wiens points out, as well as a follow-up image of the ChemCam Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) autonomous targeting system targets from the weekend, a 6×4 mosaic of the planned drill area, and a stereo 2×5 mosaic of target “Alpin.”

Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) will get a full suite of images (25 cm, 5 cm stereo, and 2 cm) on “Troon.”

Short drive

A very short drive of 15 feet (roughly 4.5 meters) is planned to arrive at the candidate drill site.

There are Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) passive and active observations and post-drive imaging, including a Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) observation.

On the second sol, ChemCam will take a passive sky observation and will do several passive calibration activities.

“With that, we expect Curiosity to be set for the Glasgow drill campaign,” Wiens concludes.

Road map

Meanwhile, a new rover road map has been issued.

The map shows the route driven by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity through the 2745 Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (April 27, 2020).

Numbering of the dots along the line indicate the sol number of each drive. North is up. The scale bar is 1 kilometer (~0.62 mile).

From Sol 2742 to Sol 2745, Curiosity had driven a straight line distance of about 110.63 feet (33.72 meters), bringing the rover’s total odometry for the mission to 13.73 miles (22.09 kilometers).

The base image from the map is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera (HiRISE) in NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

 

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now carrying out Sol 2746 tasks.

New imagery shows the rover’s current whereabouts and its surrounding landscape:

 

LIVE! APRIL 25TH

6-9PM Pacific Time | 9PM-MID Eastern Time

Host Jeremy Scott’s “Into The Parabnormal”

Go to:

http://parabnormalradio.com/

 

1st Half: Leonard David digs into the science and technology behind the rush to inhabit the Moon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2nd Half: Nancy Atkinson takes us behind-the-scenes of NASA’s Apollo missions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now performing Sol 2744 tasks.

A just issued Curiosity traverse map shows the route driven by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity through the 2742 Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (April 24, 2020).

Numbering of the dots along the line indicate the sol number of each drive. North is up. The scale bar is 1 kilometer (~0.62 mile).

From Sol 2734 to Sol 2742, Curiosity had driven a straight line distance of about 140.12 feet (42.71 meters), bringing the rover’s total odometry for the mission to 13.7 miles (22.05 kilometers).

The base image from the map is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera (HiRISE) in NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Meanwhile, recently relayed imagery shows the robot’s surrounding scenery:

 

 

The Center for Space Policy and Strategy has issued Slash the Trash – Incentivizing Deorbit, a report that offers five distinct concepts to incentivize compliance with the guideline to deorbit satellites.

According to the report’s authors, “there is likely to be a surge of satellites launched into space over the next decade, which means the risk of collisions in space will rise along with risks to the sustainability of the space environment from debris.”

 

 

This new report addresses several key questions:

How can the sustainability of the space domain be protected in a looming new era of increasingly congested space?

How can the international space community reduce these risks and make them more manageable?

Guideline compliance

One vital method is for satellite owners and operators to voluntarily comply with the already internationally agreed-upon guideline to deorbit satellites no longer than 25 years after the end of their mission.

Concepts are outlined to incentivize compliance with the “25-year rule” and the report offers a framework for analyzing the merits of each concept. It focuses on commercial satellites in low Earth orbit but could be applied more broadly.

The Center for Space Policy and Strategy is part of The Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit organization that advises the government on complex space enterprise and systems engineering problems.

To download your copy of Slash the Trash – Incentivizing Deorbit, go to:

https://aerospace.org/sites/default/files/2020-04/Reesman_SlashTheTrash_20200422.pdf

Pandemics and NEO Strikes – Instructive Parallels

By Clark R. Chapman, planetary scientist, Southwest Research Institute (retired), Boulder, Colorado

We are currently in the early-to-mid stages of what promises to be an exceptionally catastrophic worldwide pandemic. It isn’t early for China and a few other countries that practiced strict early social distancing, where the coronavirus disease has peaked and then dropped, though experts fear that there might be subsequent waves.

For the United States and other countries, the worst of the pandemic is still yet to come. This is also a rather rare catastrophe. It appears that no widespread disease of the potential magnitude of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has happened since the 1918/1919 flu pandemic, just over a century ago.

I’ve spent several decades studying another rare but catastrophic potential disaster, the possibility that a kilometer-wide near-Earth asteroid might collide with the Earth. 

Such near-Earth objects (NEOs) can come in any size, including tiny particles that produce meteors, house-sized bodies that can produce megaton blasts in the atmosphere (like Russia’s Chelyabinsk event of 2013 that sent 1,500 people to the hospital), up to the 10 kilometer wide asteroid that struck 66 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs and many other species of life.

While pandemics and NEO strikes differ in many ways, there are some instructive parallels.

Crimson contagion 2019

For starters, even though President Trump has declared that “nobody ever expected” anything like the current coronavirus pandemic, pandemics have been the subject of much academic study for a long time, just as the rare NEO threat has been studied by scientists and engineers for forty years. Despite the fact that the Trump administration dismantled the group of pandemic experts in the National Security Council in early 2018, the threat of a major pandemic was actually modeled by experts convened by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just last year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An unpublished “Do Not Distribute” report finalized in October 2019, obtained and published by the New York Times — https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6824-2019-10-key-findings-and-after/05bd797500ea55be0724/optimized/full.pdf#page=1) — outlines a multi-month tabletop exercise (“Crimson Contagion 2019”) coordinated by the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. It involved numerous federal agencies, including the National Security Council; the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, Interior, Justice, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs; the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Small Business Administration (SBA); fourteen states; numerous tribal nations and pueblos; the City of Chicago; and dozens of non-governmental and private sector organizations (e.g. the Red Cross, hospitals, universities, health systems, insurance companies, pharmacies, and professional medical associations).

One might have expected the President and/or his top advisors to have been aware of the findings in the 63-page report and recommendations from this exercise, but apparently – through some kind of grotesque organizational oversight – they were not, or at least didn’t treat it seriously and have forgotten about it.

Tabletop exercises

Similarly, experts on the topic of potential NEO disasters have been performing analogous tabletop exercises since August 2013, when the first one was held at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Headquarters, organized by individuals from NASA Headquarters and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, FEMA, The Aerospace Corporation, RAND Corporation, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Some of the exercises have been held in Washington D.C. and others at the every-two-year Planetary Defense Conferences held in, for example, Rome, Tokyo, and Maryland. Besides involving many international experts and agencies, the second tabletop exercise, also held at FEMA Headquarters, involved individuals from many U.S. federal agencies, including the Department of Defense (DoD), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, Department of Labor, the U.S. Forest Service, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Veterans Affairs, etc.

A problem with NEO tabletop exercises is that they mostly involved space scientists and engineers playing roles; few experts on global finances, sociology, and psychology were involved to reliably predict how society would react. I imagine that experts in the trenches of the Department of HHS might have been more knowledgeable about how to simulate society’s response to a threatened pandemic than we were simulating an NEO disaster.

The reason such exercises are undertaken is to assess potential disasters and then propose steps that governments and other entities should take to be ready to deal with a disaster should it threaten. It is meaningless to hold such exercises if their reports are filed away so that leaders are unaware of their findings and recommendations when such a disaster threatens.

Communications channels

In the case of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is likely to be immediately well-informed about any relevant NEO observations or predictions, it has developed methods for communicating with relevant federal agencies (as specified by NASA Policy Directive NPD 8740.1) including the Executive Office of the President, the State Department, and FEMA.

How effective the communication might be has (fortunately) not yet been tested by a real NEO catastrophe, because none has occurred and none is likely to occur in our lifetimes. But it is evident that any communications channels that were supposed to be used to bring the “Crimson Contagion” recommendations forward in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic failed, with terrible consequences.

Another similarity between the NEO and pandemic low-probability high-consequence disasters concerns non-intuitive aspects of “timing.”

For both pandemics and asteroid disasters, it is often vital to act immediately and never procrastinate.

Lockdown

It has become obvious in the case of Covid-19 what has been understood by pandemic experts for a century: strong, early actions are vital in slowing or stopping the spread of a pandemic. It is not clear on exactly which date President Trump’s advisors, or the President himself, became aware of the potential epidemic that began in Wuhan, China, during (or before) early December 2019. Surely there was some early denial in China. But the Wuhan disease cluster was identified by the end of December and was more widely recognized as a world health concern by mid-January 2020. The situation in Wuhan was bad and the city was put on lockdown on January 24th (South Korea was declared to be on the highest level of alert the previous day).

A week later, President Trump declared a public health emergency and clamped down on some air travel from China to the U.S., paralleling his other xenophobic travel bans. He then went into weeks of denying the seriousness of the developing pandemic. Even during late February, Trump was commenting almost daily that the pandemic was “like the flu” and the dozen known U.S. cases were getting better and the number would likely soon “go to zero.” On March 6th, Trump signed the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, but he was still highly misinformed about the pandemic and downplaying it (it was on that day that he said that “anybody that wants a test can get it,” which still isn’t close to being true over six weeks later).

Meanwhile, it is clear that the relevant people in his administration were going slowly during the period late-January to early-March on necessary preparations for the pandemic. Thus it is widely opined by pandemic experts that effective testing and other preparations were delayed by four to six weeks because of apathy by the Trump administration.

Relevance of time

Even after a national emergency was declared, it was evident that many politicians and news reporters failed to comprehend the relevance of “time” in understanding the exponential growth of the pandemic. For instance, a critical measure of the strength of the virus is the percentage of people who become infected who eventually die of the disease.

In the case of the ongoing seasonal flu, the ratio is about 0.1% (or one-in-a-thousand people who get the flu eventually die from it or its complications). Of course, in the case of the flu, vaccinations prevent many people (order half) from even getting it, and “herd immunity” protects many others. 

Because it is well understood, many people who get the flu and might otherwise die are successfully treated and recover. In the case of Covid-19, many reports took the number who have died in a particular country and divided by the reported cumulative number infected in that country as a measure of the lethality. But those who die don’t do so on the day they become infected.

A typical period of a month to six weeks elapses between infection and death. In between, there are other important durations: from infection to when the infected person becomes contagious, the common delay between becoming contagious and showing symptoms of the disease, the further delay until the symptoms become sufficiently severe that the patient is hospitalized, yet another duration between hospital admission and being placed on a ventilator, and the final duration – for those patients who die – between being placed on a ventilator and dying. With all these stages growing exponentially (and not necessarily at the same rate) it is simply wrong to look at statistics for any two stages on a particular date and compare them.

With the extremely delayed testing in the U.S. and the large fraction that are pre-symptomatic, it is difficult to know when the early stages began for most people, or how many in fact developed the disease. Even the final stages are uncertain: it is sometimes unclear if a particular severely ill patient, or a deceased patient, had Covid-19 or just the flu (which itself kills tens of thousands of U.S. citizens each winter season). Planning for numbers of hospital beds or ventilators requires estimated extrapolations from the number identified as having the disease (enhanced by an uncertain factor due to inadequate testing) to the number expected to need ventilators some weeks later. People unfamiliar with exponential growth have often complained that the quantities of supplies ordered by state governors are exaggerated when in fact they may be underestimated due to uncertainties in the rates of growth.

Early action

There are analogous, non-intuitive timing issues involved in planning a response to any future NEO impact threat. For example, soon after it was discovered in 2011, it was noted that NEO 2011 AG5 had a tiny but significant chance of impacting Earth on February 5, 2040. With a diameter estimated between 100 and 300 meters, such an impact – with potential explosive energy ranging between 100 and 900 megatons – could devastate a whole country or even a whole continent. A 29-year advance warning might seem like a long time in the future, hardly meriting immediate action. But it turned out that, for non-intuitive technical reasons, early action was likely to be required.

The 2040 impact would be preceded by a 2023 passage of the NEO through a “keyhole.” (A keyhole is a small region of space rather near the Earth which, if entered by an asteroid, would result in a significant change in its orbit by Earth’s gravity that would bring it back to strike the Earth many years later, e.g. on February 5, 2040.)

Disturbing results

Simulations of space missions that could deflect the NEO (e.g. by slamming into it so that it would miss the Earth rather than impact) had disturbing results. It would be theoretically simple to deflect the NEO prior to 2023 so that it would miss the keyhole and hence miss striking the Earth in 2040. But after keyhole passage, it would tax the capabilities of even the largest, most effective launch vehicles to get a spacecraft to 2011 AG5 well before 2040 (with launches between 2026 and 2029) to deflect it away from impacting Earth.

By early 2012 it was calculated that the chances of impacting the Earth (most likely in Latin America) in 2040 were about 1-in-500. While those odds might seem small, such chances of destroying several countries and killing millions would hardly seem acceptable to people living in those countries. Yet NASA concluded that with such low probabilities it would be premature to begin planning for such an expensive deflection mission.  It would prefer to wait for more observations of the asteroid, which would likely improve knowledge of the body’s orbit and probably render a deflection mission unnecessary. Unfortunately, in 2012 the NEO was so far away from Earth and hence so faint that it would be difficult to re-observe it until autumn of 2013.

Procrastination

But just as with the coronavirus, you can’t procrastinate in developing a mission that could deflect 2011 AG5 before its 2023 keyhole passage.

Mission calculations showed that the spacecraft would have to strike the asteroid in the beginning of 2021, requiring a launch of the deflector spacecraft at the beginning of 2020, and it would take years to develop and build that mission. But, in addition to the deflector, another spacecraft would need to orbit around the NEO in order to observe the deflection operation and make precise course-corrections if needed because of the uncertain results of the big slam.

The orbiting spacecraft would be a so-called Gravity Tractor which could further modify the NEO’s orbit to ensure that it would miss the keyhole. It takes much longer to orbit an asteroid than to just slam into it, so the Gravity Tractor would have to be launched in early 2017 to get into orbit before the deflector would arrive. Since it would take at least four years to develop and build the Gravity Tractor in time for an early-2017 launch, development would have to begin in early 2013, nearly a year before astronomers could again observe 2011 AG5 to assess whether it was still headed for the keyhole.

These circumstances motivated several of us to see if it might be possible to observe the faint NEO and refine its orbit before early 2013. We found that it was marginally possible to observe the asteroid using one of the world’s largest telescopes. Dave Tholen of the University of Hawaii used the very large 8-meter Gemini telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to observe the asteroid in October 2012. The new data showed that the asteroid would just miss the keyhole in 2023 and so it could not come nearer to the Earth in 2040 than twice the distance to the Moon.

Stop the disaster

Thus just as a death from infection by a virus doesn’t occur until weeks or months later, the mounting of a successful NEO deflection mission often requires years or decades of planning, development, launch, impact on the asteroid, and then waiting for the NEO to drift far enough away from its previous impact trajectory to miss the Earth.

In the case of 2011 AG5, a critical early step had to be taken more than 27 years before the devastating catastrophe might have happened.

An attribute that the NEO hazard shares with pandemics, but is rare for natural hazards, is that human beings can potentially stop the disaster from happening.  Hardly any other natural hazard can be totally prevented. Explosives can be used to trigger avalanches, rendering them harmless. But bad effects of most natural hazards can only be partially mitigated by measures like hardening buildings to withstand earthquakes, restricting building in flood plains, issuing evacuation warnings, etc.

In the case of potential NEO disasters, search programs – when fully implemented – can identify any large NEO headed our way and then a space mission can be launched to deflect the NEO away from striking the Earth (large comets are very rare exceptions). Or, if time is too short, ground zero can be precisely specified and people can be provided with many days, weeks, or more to evacuate. It is very unlikely that a regionally destructive NEO would not be found before striking Earth, especially once several search projects being developed are completed and become operational.

Usually, warnings to evacuate from oncoming tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods are much shorter, although the effectiveness depends on the promptness of alerts. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, a Hurricane Watch wasn’t issued until the probability of a hurricane striking New Orleans had risen to 20%, just two days before it struck…too late for effective evacuation. In the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were perhaps two months of warning before the pandemic reached serious levels in the United States, but the predictions were dismissed by President Trump until it was too late to take effective action such as testing and contact-tracing, wasting up to six weeks.

Levels of redundancy

Another attribute of NEO planning that should have been employed in the weeks leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic is redundancy.

Decades of experience with failed rocket launches have led the aerospace community to adopt multiple levels of redundancy into space missions. Sometimes limited funding doesn’t permit adequate redundancy, which unfortunately can result in failures of satellites and space missions. But in the tabletop exercises for NEO defense, the prospects of terrible devastation from an impact always mandated multiple levels of redundancy in missions to deflect (or destroy) the threatening NEO. Multiple deflection missions are developed and launched in case one or more fail.

Unfortunately, in the case of Covid-19, the decision was made to develop only one approach to testing.  Despite opportunities to purchase tests developed in other countries, and recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), a single-string approach to testing developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was all that was relied on (other labs were even forbidden by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from doing any testing).When the CDC test was found to be flawed, there was a lengthy delay before a revised test could be developed and distributed widely throughout the country and before the FDA relaxed its restrictions.

I don’t know if earlier plans and tabletop exercises for pandemics addressed the need for redundancy, but there have been extremely deadly consequences from the failure to implement redundancy in developing Covid-19 tests in the U.S.

— Clark R. Chapman, planetary scientist, Southwest Research Institute (retired), Boulder, Colorado