NASA to build a new space telescope to spot dangerous asteroids

NASA will be building a space telescope which will spot the asteroids which are potentially hazardous to the Earth.

New Delhi | Updated: September 24, 2019 12:28 PM IST

3 min read

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Artist’s illustration of NEOCam. (Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA will be building a space telescope that is going to help the US space agency spot the asteroids which are potentially hazardous to the Earth. On Monday, Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, committed funding for a space-based telescope, which will help the agency find a majority of the near-Earth asteroids that could threaten the planet.

During a meeting of the Planetary Science Advisory Committee held in Washington DC, Zurbuchen said that the new instrument may get launched as early as 2025, but stressed that this is not an official target date and said that it will depend on how much funding the project receives. “The goal is not to do everything for eternity, the goal is to do the right things as they pop up,” Space.com reported quoting Zurbuchen.

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has made a different bucket in the budget for planetary defence, which is worth $150 million in the current fiscal year. The latest initiative is based on a project called NEOCam, which is a mission concept that has been discussed by the planetary-defence community for years.

The NEOCam project was proposed formally as a science mission, but it was not selected for funding because when the proposal was first discussed, it was considered to be under the framework of science and not the planetary defence. And even though both the parties keep a keen interest in asteroids, their need for information differs.

According to Zurbuchen, the new budgetary system will address this difference by taking the planetary defence out of competition with science. He confirmed that the new telescope from NASA will get closely modeled on the agency’s NEOCam project.

The NEOCam project finds its roots in the NEOWISE project, that is from a previous astrophysics mission called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This particular telescope has been focused on asteroids in 2013 under a new name NEOWISE, and from then on, this telescope has spotted over tens of thousands of the space rocks, of which 135 are traveling in the immediate neighbourhood of our planet.

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But since the NEOWISE project was not built for this purpose, it is approaching the end of its life cycle. According to the Space.com report, the NEOWISE mission is expected to end around mid-2020. Zurbuchen confirmed that the new project’s key mission would last for five years, that could be extended to 10 years.

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