Cover of NASA’s Planetary Defense Strategy and Action Plan, featuring images of the Double-Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, concept illustrations of the Near Earth Object Surveyor, and illustrations of the orbits of objects in the Solar System.
For three decades, NASA has been studying near Earth objects (NEOs), asteroids and comets that orbit the Sun and come within 30 million miles of our planet’s orbit. While NEOs have the potential to help planetary scientists better understand the birth and formation of our solar system, some travel in orbits that bring them close enough to Earth to be a potential impact hazard.
To address this problem, NASA established its Planetary Defense Coordination Office in 2016 to manage the agency’s efforts to find, track, characterize and if necessary mitigate NEO impacts.
Administrator Bill Nelson says “As we’ve seen with the success of the DART mission, NASA is committed to protecting Earth from potentially dangerous asteroids and comets, planetary defense benefits all of humanity, and NASA’s strategy and action plan outline how we will continue to protect our home planet over the next decade.”
NASA’s Planetary Defense Strategy and Action Plan to protect Earth
•White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released its updated National Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan for Near-Earth Object Hazards and Planetary Defense to improve U.S. readiness to address NEO impact hazards over a 10-year period, primarily by organizing and coordinating interagency efforts.
•NASA’s strategy responds to America’s National Planetary Defense Strategy. NASA’s strategy focuses the agency’s efforts on planetary earth defense activities to ensure that it is working toward the goals outlined in the plan at the national level.
•NASA’s strategy includes all of the goals listed in the plan at the national level and adds two additional goals specific to NASA. To achieve its goals, NASA’s strategy follows an architecture of anticipating desired end states, identifying key challenges, and developing actions to address the identified challenges.
Key areas focus for NASA’s Earth defense over the next decade include:
•Improving NEO exploration, detection and characterization to work towards a complete catalog of all NEOs that could pose an Earth impact hazard
•Development and demonstration of NEO mitigation technologies similar to the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the world’s first planetary defense test mission to successfully demonstrate a single method of asteroid deflection using a kinetic impactor spacecraft.
•Support international cooperation related to NEO exploration and mitigation of impacts on international capabilities
•Strengthening interagency coordination between NASA and other US government agencies to improve and streamline US government NEO response preparedness and planning
•Review the agency’s internal planning to maximize the benefits obtained from limited resources
•Better integration of messages related to planetary defense work with the agency’s strategic communications
•Each of the strategy’s objectives is defined into short-term, medium-term, long-term and interim timetables with the aim of achieving all objectives within the next 10 years.
The release of NASA’s Planetary Defense Strategy and Action Plan provides guidance for the agency as it works on forward-looking planetary defense efforts, including the launch of NASA’s NEO Surveyor mission. Once launched, the NEO Surveyor working in tandem with current ground-based optical telescope capabilities will drastically accelerate the rate at which NASA is able to find the previously undiscovered population of asteroids and comets that could impact our planet.
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