It’s the real stuff that nightmares are made of: 250 meters across and rushing toward you from the darkness at over 20,000 miles per hour. This is no ethereal terrorerrorist bogeyman. This is asteroid 2007 TU₂₄

As the name implies, 2007 TU₂₄ was discovered in 2007, 11th October to be precise. Too late for even the greatest scientific minds to be able to devise a way to deflect it before it’s rendezvous with Earth this morning, 29th January at 08:33ZULU.

Luckily for the human race, 2007 TU₂₄ will be passing by us at a mere 537,500km distance, roughly 1.44 Earth-Moon distances. It will be a 10th magnitude object in the night sky for some and astronomers will study it briefly as it disappears back into the night.

So, why am I playing this up when I usually play down ’scare’ stories? The fact of the matter is, there are an awful lot of large (and potentially massive) rocks which cross the Earth’s orbit on a regular basis and we only know about a fraction of them. 2007 TU₂₄ isn’t by any means the biggest object out there but it would certainly hurt if it had hit us.

Had it hit central London, 2007 TU₂₄ it would have made a crater 2.5 miles wide and 1,500 feet deep. The rest of London would have been deleted from the map by the air-blast’s intense overpressure and 350mph winds out beyond the M25. A strong seismic shockwave would have shaken structures as far away as Birmingham. The immediate death toll would have been counted in the tens of millions.

The point I make is that while the government will happily spend billions of pounds starting wars and sheeple-worrying with the terrorerrorist spectre,  they spend practically nothing on protecting the population from a very real threat posed by Near Earth Objects. They’re not all 250m wide minnows like 2007 TU_24, there are 20km wide monsters out there which, if they collided with the Earth, would cause the extinction of our entire race. It’s really not a question if ‘if’ either, it’s a question of ‘when’.

So what do we do? Well, if there was a large NEO coming our way, we’d need one thing more than anything; Time. We’d need to detect the NEO as early as possible to allow for the research and development necessary for timely interception and deflection. In order to detect early, we need to look. Only the US government spends any money on wide sky surveys  for this purpose and even that isn’t much. Proper NEO survey and deflection capability would require entire space programs and even they aren’t that well funded by some standards. For example, NASA’s entire annual budget would only pay for about 2 months of current US operations in Iraq.

Unfortunately, the human race as a whole seems to have difficulty seeing beyond the fragile little biosphere which they currently inhabit. This could well be their undoing.

In the meantime, you may like to look at the UK’s biggest contribution to NEO survey and detection. Spaceguard UK Note that Spaceguard UK is not government funded.