OIG Report: NASA’s Planetary Defense Strategy
Keith’s note: NASA has a Planetary Defense Program. They want to find asteroids that might pose a risk before they pose a threat. The other day the Vera Rubin Observatory released imagery of a variety of objects including 2,104 previously unknown asteroids discovered in just a few hours by this new instrument. NASA has ignored the Rubin observatory’s debut altogether while the rest of the world stopped to pay attention. This new NASA OIG report NASA’s Implementation and Management of Its Planetary Defense Strategy mentions Rubin as an option but does not ding the Planetary Defense Program for ignoring Rubin. Why is that? More below.
The NASA OIG report says “NASA leads the nation’s planetary defense efforts to address the potential hazards of asteroids and comets impacting Earth. While the Agency has made significant progress in its planetary defense mission, multiple challenges hinder its ability to fully execute its planetary defense strategic goals. Further, actions are needed to address the role of ground-based assets in the future as new observatories with more advanced capabilities come online”.
They go on to say “We also found that actions are needed to address the role of ground-based assets in the future of planetary defense. NASA leverages several ground-based observatories, including the Deep Space Network, and the Agency is approaching an era of advanced NEO surveys as new observatory assets come online. While the current network of older groundbased observatories can still play an important role, we spoke with officials from two observatories who noted multiple deferred maintenance issues impacted NEO detection and follow-up capabilities. For example, one observatory has two old cameras that need to be replaced to be more effective. More effective planning is required to ensure these assets are integrated into the work that will be performed by two upcoming observatories—NEO Surveyor and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. These new observatories are expected to find and track significantly more NEOs than current capabilities, which will likely mean a substantial increase in necessary follow-up observations.”
Part of the whole planetary defense thing is identifying hazardous asteroids before they can pose a threat to Earth. That means telescopes – in space and on Earth. I checked through this report and no mention is made of the Vera Rubin Observatory. Its capabilities were well known before it became operational. In an era of “all of government efforts”. NASA has still made no mention of the Vera Rubin Observatory despite world wide coverage.Its not a NASA observatory. Vera Rubin Observatory is a NSF facility – not a NASA facility. Apparently that is why.
Given this prodigious asteroid finding capability you’d think at least NASA Planetary Defense folks would be aware of this demonstrated capability by Vera Rubin Observatory. I checked the website. No mention of Vera Rubin Observatory. The only thing I could find was after a search with the NASA.gov search engine: “NASA’s Next-Generation Asteroid Impact Monitoring System Goes Online” from 2021.
Why can’t NSF and NASA work together and cross pollinate their planetary defense and astronomy capabilities better than they have?
NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.