Climate change prodigy Greta Thunberg spent the better portion of a week recounting her fears of mass extinction to the U.S. Congress and the United Nations.
However, emails from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reveal that we very nearly had a significant and catastrophic climate change event for which humankind could hardly be blamed.
Internal emails from NASA show that the space agency was unaware of asteroid 2019 OK, described as a “city killer,” until the last moment on July 24.The giant, football field-sized space rock was not detected by researchers until 24 hours before it was set to whiz past Earth at a distance of just 48,000 miles, traveling at 55,000 miles per hour.“Because there may be media coverage tomorrow, I’m alerting you that in about 30 mins a 57-130 meter sized asteroid will pass Earth at only 0.19 lunar distances (~48,000 miles),” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, wrote in a July 24 email, adding the asteroid “was spotted about 24 hrs ago.”
Paul Chodas of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory indicated that the asteroid managed to slip through NASA’s tracking systems.
“This object slipped through a whole series of our capture nets,” he stated in an email to his colleagues. “I wonder how many times this situation has happened without the asteroid being discovered at all.”NASA’s failure to spot 2019 OK sooner is certainly alarming especially since the agency has constantly stressed the importance of early detection in preventing an asteroid impact from happening. Hopefully, the space agency will implement better systems that are capable of tracking all asteroids that might approach Earth.
How many billions of dollars have been squandered by climate change activists and politicians, diverted to useless global warming projects and to ineffective energy technologies?
All of those resources, including the scientific research and experimentation, that have been used on “climate change” could be going to projects that could help us detect asteroids that really present a threat to this planet.
With this in mind, perhaps it now makes sense that NASA Administrators have just announced that the agency is planning to launch a space telescope to watch for hazardous asteroids as part of its planetary defense strategy.
The telescope will use infrared radiation to detect the heat of rocks hurtling through space. For now, NASA administrators are calling it the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission (NEOSM).”This is a great step forward for thinking about human destiny, because the dinosaurs certainly did not have an asteroid survey program to protect themselves,” Richard Binzel, an asteroid researcher and professor of planetary sciences at MIT, told Business Insider. “Having knowledge of what’s out there is something that the planetary science community has been advocating for for nearly 30 years. So this is a breakthrough decades in the making.”NASA’s new mission is expected to cost between $500 million and $600 million. It could launch as early as 2025, though that’s not an official timeline.
NASA has been steadily increasing its work in the area of planetary defense. Interestingly, an experiment for an asteroid killer is planned for 2021.
…This program received $60 million in funding for fiscal year 2017, $76 million for 2018 and it expects to receive $150 million in 2020. Figures for 2019 were not available because budgets had not been passed, according to NASA’s budget report.The agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, mission, which aims to “change the motion of an asteroid in space,” receives the bulk of planetary defense funding. DART functions by crashing into potentially dangerous asteroids at a speed of approximately 6.6 kilometers per second, or 14,764 mph, with the aim of changing the speed of the incoming asteroid.A DART demonstration will occur in 2021 and will impact an asteroid of comparable size to that which passed the Earth in July — roughly 160 meters across. This is, according to NASA, “more typical of the size of the asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to the Earth.”
Personally, I would love to see this effort paired with the development of even more asteroid killing technologies from the U.S. Space Force.
While Greta jets around the world scolding Western civilization for its climate sins, American scientists and servicemen and women are working to protect us all from a real Extinction Level Event.
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