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Just wonderful - our defense against Earth Shattering Ka-Booms v/s the budget

A strategically bad idea -- saving $3 Million. From the BBC:

Cuts cast doubt on asteroid plan
Plans to more precisely plot the orbit of an asteroid with a small chance of hitting Earth in 2036 may be badly hit by funding cuts to a US radar facility.

Radar measurements set to be made in January 2013 by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, US, could help rule out an impact by asteroid Apophis.

But the cuts mean Arecibo needs an extra $2m-$3m a year to continue.

If not, the observations planned for 2011-2013 will have to be abandoned, the facility's director told BBC News.

Dr Michael Nolan said he was "moderately optimistic" that the money could be found.

But he pointed out that Arecibo was the only observatory in the world sensitive enough for the task.

"If we measure [Apophis] in 2013, there is something like a 95% chance that we'll be able to prove that it can't hit the Earth in 2036," he explained.

Such threats present challenges for policymakers; while the chances of an asteroid strike might be small, the effects would be devastating.

The power of radar for refining the orbits of Near-Earth Objects (Neos) such as Apophis lies in being able to determine the range to the asteroids, by accurate timing of the emitted and returned pulses.

Dr Nolan, who is also the observatory's head of radar astronomy, told BBC News: "If you have a regular telescope, you can tell where it is from left to right in a sense. The radar measures distance, so it is forward to backwards in that same sense.

"If you do all of those at once, you get a very good measurement of where it is."

Every so often, politicians and policy makers look at ways to save money and the small non-sexy projects are the ones that generally get the axe. This is a blind stupid shame as it is these projects that do 80% of the scientific heavy-lifting while the glamorous projects like the Large Hadron Collider - $9 Billion, National Ignition Facility - $4 Billion or the wonderfully named ITER at $6.7 Billion get all the money and public interest. These three projects are built for basically one task each whereas something like Arecibo can be repurposed to do many different aspects of radio astronomy and Near Earth Object detection and ranging. You could go to the janitor's lounge at ITER and shake a couple million out of their sofa for cryin' out loud but try and get funding for something that has been cranking out solid science since 1963 and no... Posted by DaveH at March 26, 2010 6:36 PM