Minisatellites could detect dangerous asteroids, researchers propose
But other experts doubt feasibility of plan for tracking near-Earth space rocks
Go tiny or go home. That’s one suggestion for building telescopes to find a city-smashing asteroid before it finds us. A fleet of pint-sized satellites orbiting the sun could track down the majority of asteroids that threaten the Earth, researchers propose online March 29 on arXiv.org. Some experts worry, however, that the plan has holes big enough to drive an asteroid through.
Five miniature observatories evenly spaced just inside the orbit of Venus would let NASA meet its congressional mandate to discover 90 percent of asteroids wider than 140 meters by 2020, says Michael Shao, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and colleagues. Whereas a single dedicated space telescope would take eight to 10 years and about half a billion dollars to find the same space rocks, Shao contends that his armada could do it in three years for about one-tenth of the cost.