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Meteor Crater visit
T
he risk of asteroids hitting the earth may seem rather academic until you “meet
it face-to-face.” With this in mind, Ed Lu organized a visit to the famous Meteor
Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona in late April of this year.
People flew in from all over the Western states. No less than three private air-
planes went from Santa Barbara, piloted by Edwin Sahakian and John Friedman,
John Goerke and George Powell, fifteen people in all.
Because this Crater is young in geological terms – 50,000 years old – and in
arid desert with little rain, it is the best preserved of its kind in the world. The public
is only allowed to walk around the rim, but Ed made special arrangements for ev-
eryone to hike to the bottom. This certainly made us realize its enormous size, not
necessarily apparent from pictures. It is both spectacular, and for those with even
the least imagination, unsettling. This rent in the Earth is 4,000 feet across and
almost 600 feet deep. Yet the rock that tore it out in just a few seconds was a mere
150 feet across. For anyone who might have doubted the potential risk from as-
teroids, hiking to the bottom made the danger of an impact dramatically apparent.
Charles Lindbergh described his love of flying with the words, “Science, freedom,
beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life?” He would have certainly felt
it about this extraordinary day. Sentinel is science. Private airplanes gave the free-
dom, with an early start, to make the journey in a day. Beauty is on all sides, even
in the barren desert. And of course, there was a splash of adventure.
NASA and the Private Sector:
The Best of Both Worlds
This will be a genuine public/private partnership. A formal Space Act
Agreement has been signed between the B612 Foundation and NASA. NASA
will provide communication with telescope via the Deep Space Network,
NASA’s worldwide array of huge communications dishes. Because of the
obvious importance and appeal of this project, Sentinel has been able to at-
tract arguably the most outstanding scientists and engineers in the world for
its in-house technical team. And with this agreement the project will draw
on all the accumulated wisdom NASA’s personnel can bring. This will give
the project the best of everything, the speed of a commercial project com-
bined with the full depth of NASA’s knowledge and unique infrastructure.
Of course the science results will immediately be made available to
the world science community through the standard channels for reporting
discoveries of Near Earth Objects.
Following the Chelyabinsk event, the U.S. Senate held hearings on the
dangers and what should be done to protect the U.S. and the world from
the threat of asteroids. Both the Head of NASA, Charles Bolden, and the
Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, John
Holdren, told the Senate that the B612 Foundation and the Sentinel space
telescope would be doing the search for the USA and for the world.
Common Sense Insurance
Earthquakes and asteroids have something in common. “The Big Ones”
are rare but small ones remind us all the time of the problem. In the case
of earthquakes, we already take precautions against events that are di-
sastrous even if unlikely. People take insurance and we spend enormous
amounts of money and time preparing. Spread across millions of build-
ings, the cost of making earthquake-resistant construction is enormous. But
there is no similar preparation for asteroids. Common sense suggests it would
be wise to buy the insurance, in this the $450 million cost of
the Sentinel
Space Telescope, trivial compared to what is spent related to earthquakes. Of
course if a threatening asteroid is found, it will need to be diverted. But the cost
will likely be about the same as a single large scientific space mission. It will
certainly be trivial compared to the cost of the damage if it was to strike an
inhabited area or aim a tsunami onto a populated shore.
As Ed Lu says, “We don’t want civilization to be destroyed because we
did not bother to look.” One of the shocking things is how little is known.
Apophis, appropriately named for an evil mythological figure, was only dis-
covered in 2004: it is a very large asteroid passing near Earth: if it hit us it
would have devastating consequences. DA14, which skimmed the Earth in
February, was only discovered in 2012. And the asteroid that hit Russia in
February was quite unknown. Without Sentinel, it will continue to be impos-
sible to know what threatens us.
122
summer
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fal l
UP&OUT
At Meteor Crater
from left: Nott, Rusty
Schweickart Apollo
9, Ed Lu Space Sta-
tion Astronaut and
Montecito residents
Simon Raab and
Stuart Gillard.