PLEASE NOTE:
*
CCNet-ESSAY, 6 September 1999
-----------------------------
ASTEROIDS, COMETS, METEORS & LOST LUGGAGE: ED GRONDINE'S ACM
DIARY
From E.P. Grondine <epgrondine@hotmail.com>
Hello Benny! -
Sorry to be so late in getting
this account of the 1999
International Conference on Asteroids, Comets, and Meteors to
you, but
my trusty Sony Pressman M-747V micro-cassete recorder took the
opportunity of the conference to begin sputtering. I
suppose I should
not hold the failure against it, as it has performed reliably for
some
13 years now, and given truly great performance, recording many
important conversations in full, often from my own jacket pocket,
and
this despite my clumsily allowing it to drop to the floor,
demonstrably
one too many time too often.
At the end of July I took a break from the sad
task of dealing with
my late mother's estate to pay a visit to the 1999 International
Conference on Asteroids, Comets, and Meteors held in lovely
Ithaca,
New York. As you know, the major sponsor of the raise in NASA NEO
detection moneys from $3.5 million per year to $10 million per
year,
Representative George Brown, passed away shortly before the
conference,
with the moneys still not through the legislative process. These
moneys
need to be secured, and my plan for the week was simply to use my
contacts with fellow reporters to help ensure that the voters out
there
are as aware as possible as to the danger. Aside from this goal,
for
CCNet subscribers I hoped to get some sense of the consensus
among the
experts here on both Binzel's hazard index and Morrison's
confirmation
scheme.
This coverage will be in my usual chatty
style, and if anyone out
there doesn't like it, they can simply hit the DELETE key now.
For
everyone else, who has been reading abstracts to the point of
sleep and
are seeking a diversion, here goes -
SUNDAY: THE RECEPTION
I arrived in Ithaca after an all night
drive from Virginia, where
for the last several weeks we had been enjoying 100 degree
Fahrenheit
temperatures and air polluted so badly that the experts were
advising
people to stop breathing. Undoubtedly climate played a
large role in
my decision to go to Ithaca, as the weather there in the daytime
was in
the 80's with very low humidity, in the nights in the 50's, and
air
quality was so good that I was once again really able to enjoy my
cigarettes.
Ithaca is situated at the south end of
Lake Cayuga, which is one of
the New York finger Lakes, and some are now suspecting these were
formed
by the collision of an impactor with the Earth. As one might
suspect,
the landscape there is very hilly, and Cornell University is
situated
atop one of these hills above the lake-shore town of Ithaca. As a
result
of this terrain the streets are convoluted; throw in the desire
of the
neighborhoods to channel university traffic away from their own
streets,
then add in the closure of the remaining streets for the
construction of
a new campus cooling system, and getting around by car was
extraordinarily difficult. I am of the opinion that the
Cornell
admission process involves setting prospective students loose
without
a map, and then allowing in those who find the campus.
The conference was held in the
Statler Hotel, a hotel which is
owned by Cornell University itself and built right on its campus.
I
don't think there is any other college which can boast of a
similar
facility, and how this came to be is quite interesting. It seems
the
hotel baron Mr. Statler had been hiring people trained by Cornell
University's hotel school, was extremely pleased with them,
decided that
Cornell needed its own hotel if it was going to be able to really
train
people right, and then simply gave Cornell the money to build a
first
class hotel.
But the hotel was a little over my
budget, and after settling into
a nearby motel and catching a few hours of sleep, I proceeded to
the
preliminary reception. I dressed for this in jeans and my
seersucker
sportscoat, which I thought would be sufficiently casual; I was
surprised when most of the guests showed up in standard dress of
shorts,
sandals, and t-shirts. While standing outside waiting for
my
credentials, I noticed another gentleman dressed in seersucker
and we
struck up a conversation. It turned out that the well dressed
gentleman
was Nobel prize winner Bob Richardson, Vice Provost for Research
at
Cornell, and one of the sponsors of the conference.
Dr. Richardson's current focus is in
extremely low temperature
physics; coincidentally he had met the week before with our
mutual
acquaintance Harrison Schmitt at one of the Apollo memorial
sessions.
Dr. Richardson told me that at that session Schmitt had once
again
proposed going back to the Moon to mine Helium 3 for fusion
reactors,
and dismissed Schmitt's scheme as prohibitively expensive.
He went on
to describe the current use of Helium 3 in nuclear magnetic
resonance
imaging of the lungs, and we chatted briefly about the Helium 3
currently being supplied from the former Soviet Union.
After this I
described briefly my own scheme for using the Moon as a place to
construct
radars to provide warning of the arrival of smaller impactors,
and pointed out that if such a project were to be undertaken, it
might be
possible as a side benefit to obtain further supplies of Helium 3
at a
reasonable cost.
Entering the reception, I met in person
my old e-mail friend Hal
Povemire from the meteorite list. When Hal mentioned that there
are no
authenticated deaths from meteorites, I brought up the Cambridge
Conference and Bob Kobres' archives, about whose existence Hal
had had
no knowledge. We agreed that a better way of describing the
situation
would be that "while many deaths are suspected, none have
been confirmed
yet", since the "authenticated" part of Hal's
original quote is usually
either left out by editors or ignored by readers. Hal
mentioned that
Kathy Sawyer of the Washington Post sometimes goes to him for
quotes,
so at least now she won't be getting a "no confirmed deaths
from
meteorites" quote from Hal anytime in the future.
As I was exchanging introductions
with others, I was sometimes
surprised to learn how few of the ACM participants knew about the
Cambridge Conference. The work being done now in the recovery of
impact
events from the historical record is completely unknown to a
surprisingly large number of astronomers, and Earth impacts
remain for them
something that is only theoretically possible. Little wonder
there
was a tremendous focus at the conference on theoretical studies,
rather
than on studies on impact data from either the Earth, Mars, the
Moon, or
Jupiter's moons.
I had an enjoyable reunion-union with
Clark Chapman. Clark still
denies that the congressmen were trying to get him to speak about
the
Minor Planet Center at that hearing, even though the MPC had
played a
large role in the 1997 XF11 affair only a few weeks earlier. I
reminded
Clark that he was not alone that day, and that the others there
had also
pulled blanks. Clark and I spoke about Binzel's threat scheme,
and I
will include his comments along with those of Binzel later.
After speaking with Clark, I was
distracted by an obviously giddy
and thoroughly charming Ms. R***, and seeing her condition
offered my
aid in making the trip to the bar for her to get some more wine.
Interesting, Benny, that as I have gotten older my favorite
science
fiction movie has changed from Sir Arthur's 2001 to Fellini's 8
& 1/2.
Deprived of Ms. R***'s company by old
friend of hers from
University of Maryland, who gallantly offered to help her get
back to her
hotel room, I spent some time talking with some Gunter Kargl and
Axel
Hagerman, ESA scientists from Munich working on the Rosetta
Project. I
remarked to them as to how Rosetta struck me as being similar in
many
ways to earlier NASA big science projects, with Rosetta's launch
scheduled in 2003 and its arrival in 2011. My young friends
corrected
some of my misapprehensions, as unlike researchers with the old
NASA big
science projects, my acquaintances will not remain employed for
the entire
mission, but instead will be "released" as soon as
their work is done.
Furthermore, for the Rosetta Project the ESA has adopted the new
NASA
scheme of in-house quality control testing, with its associated
cost
savings.
Later that evening I made the acquaintance of
another young ESA
researcher, whom Delta Airlines had left stranded in New York
City
without his luggage. Delta had assured him that his luggage
would be
found and forwarded to him, and had given him a whole of $50 to
tide him
over, but he had had to spend his first day in the US trying to
find a
change of clothes. Despite their promise, Delta Airlines
had still not
forwarded his luggage, but they had managed to determine,
however, that
his luggage was in no less than three different US cities.
On the way back to my motel I got
lost in the hills above Ithaca,
and after an unscheduled tour of some of the area's better
architecture
I finally managed to find my way to my bed. When I arrived
at the motel
I was still pretty keyed up, but found that a few pages of
"We started
our computer model with 1000 objects ..." made a fair
sedative.
DAY 1: MONDAY, 26 JULY
SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES?
Having become lost the previous evening
on my way back to my motel
from the reception, I now became lost once again on my return to
the
campus for the first day's events. This precipitated an
immediate
decision on my part to relocate to on-campus housing, and as I
did not
know how much housing was still available, I took care to make
this
arrangement immediately after I arrived.
As a result of these detours, I missed
the very first morning
sessions. Walking from my new on campus lodgings to the
Statler Hotel,
I crossed a footbridge spanning a ravine several hundred feet
deep.
For those who are examining the New York Finger Lakes as the
product of
an impact event, these ravines will provide a key method for
dating it,
as it will be quite simple to estimate how long it took the
streams to
erode their way through the newly raised rock.
The first event I attended was the press
conference at which Steve
Ostro and David Meisel made major announcements. When I arrived
at the
briefing room I met with Paul Chodas and Andrea Milani. This was
a real
pleasure, and they offered me a seat between them.
Ostro spoke first, describing his
thoughts on the importance of
asteroid 1998 KY26. 1998 KY26 is a baseball-diamond sized
(30 meter
diameter spheroid) carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that travels
between
the Earth and Mars every 1.3 years. Ostro is captivated by the
idea of
using this asteroid to ferry people between the Earth and Mars,
and
estimates that the water extracted from 1998 KY26's million cubic
foot
volume could support 1,000 people for 1,000 days, or be used to
generate
liquid hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuels. Further,
Steve
estimates delta v's required to get to 1998 KY26, around 3.5
meters per
second for rendezvous and 5 meters per second for fly-by, among
the
lowest delta v's required to get to any object: lower than for
any other
asteroid.
While Steve's idea to use 1998 KY26 to
ferry people between the
Earth and Mars is quite intriguing, the major announcement he
made was
during his opening remarks. Steve stated that there are two
ways of
looking at things, the pessimistic way and the optimistic way.
(Personally, I always prefer looking at things the realistic way,
but
that's just my own preference.) Steve continued that there
had been two
movies last year describing Earth impact events, "Deep
Impact" and
"Armageddon", and that these movies had promoted a
pessimistic view of
asteroids. But, he went on, next year James Cameron,
director of the
movie "Titanic", would have the first two parts of Kim
Stanley
Robinson's's Mars trilogy, "Red Mars" and "Blue
Mars" ready to release.
Now while 1998 KY26 is extremely
significant, this was major news,
and I should take a few moments to explain why. While most
people think
of James Cameron as the director of the movie
"Titanic", before that he
directed the movies "Alien" and "Terminator",
and he is Hollywood's
hottest science fiction director. His earlier project
"The Abyss" had
led to no less than two copycat movies, "Leviathon" and
"Deep Star Six".
Of more immediate relevance to Conference participants, after
"Titanic"
Cameron's next project was supposed to have been "Dark Angel
Falling",
about, surprise, an ASTEROID IMPACT EVENT. But as
"Titanic" went over
budget and into extended production, "Dark Angel
Falling" never went
ahead. However, (no surprise here), two copycat movies,
"Deep Impact"
and "Armageddon", appeared upon the screen.
I suppose that taken as a whole these
events make a sad commentary
on the intellectual bankruptcy of many in Hollywood, but also one
immediate effect has been that the release dates for "Red
Mars" and
"Blue Mars" have been tightly held secrets, as Cameron
and his backers
have not wanted to see the market flooded with cheap knock-offs
or with
un-licensed Mars tie-ins. In May of this year it was
reported that the
"Mars" series were intended for release on FOX
Television in the United
States (owned by Rupert Murdoch), and that it was hoped that
these would
lead to a regular television series on that network.
As JPL has undoubtedly been providing Cameron
with technical
assistance, Ostro's information was undoubtedly correct.
Unfortunately
for Cameron, news of the Mars Trilogy made it out months ago
anyway, and
two other movies, one "Mars", from Warner Brothers, the
other "Mission
to Mars", from Disney, will also be released next
year. In both movies
most of the Mars bound crews die.
(Two weeks after the ACM Conference,
Cameron told the Mars Society
that his 5 part television mini-series and a 3-D IMAX film would
be
released in 2001. The delayed release date and unique
formats are
surely one way of avoiding copycats. Four weeks after the
ACM
conference Cameron said that his works will be based more on the
scheme's of Bob Zubrin for manned Mars flight, as they will take
place
during the period of initial exploration. Warner Brothers
had also
changed the title of its copycat from "Mars" to
"Red Planet".)
What these movies mean altogether is
that here in the United States
it is going to be almost impossible for candidates for President
not to
take a position on manned Mars flight, and that the NASA budget
will be
a key political issue for at least the next two years.
(On a more personal note, it seems to me
that there is another way
to view Mars, and that is realistically, the same way you view
asteroids
and comets. If any producer is interested in making
"Real Mars", I know
some Russians who would be pretty interested in putting a long
range
four-wheeled rover on Mars with a Molniya-class launcher for
about $35
million or so. Give me a call: all I want for making the
introductions
is a measly 2%. On the other hand, if you want to use a US
platform and
launch vehicle, the creator of the world's only practical
artificially
intelligent robotic vision system, a necessity for any long range
Mars
rover, is a close personal friend. I look forward to
hearing from you:
Let's do launch.)
In his opening remarks Steve had
estimated the population of
asteroids with 1 kilometer or larger diameters was between
1,000-2,000,
the population of soccer field size asteroids as several hundred
thousand, and the total population of Earth crossing asteroids
the size
of baseball diamonds, 100 feet or so, at around 10 million.
When he
stated later that only the small percentage of those which were
made of
iron presented a threat, Milani let out a gasp, began muttering
"No",
and shot me a look of amazement. I was not so surprised, as Steve
had
told me the previous evening at the reception that the worst case
impact
was an impact in the Pacific which would cause a tsunami killing
about
1.5% of the Earth's population.
At the session I questioned Steve about his
estimate of the impact
threat and he stated that of the 10 million baseball sized
asteroids,
only a few percent of these were irons, and that these would be
the only
ones to get through, and that this was the reason the problem was
unimportant. By this point Milani was gasping "No!,
No!, No!", and when
Steve estimated the size of the Meteor Crater impactor at an
impossibly
large number, Milani nudged me and exclaimed, "NO, NO,
around 50-60
meters".
Giving some measure of Steve's confidence in
his vision of 1998
KY26, he estimates that a water extraction technology
demonstration
mission could be finished in 6 years, or by 2006, if the decision
was
made now to undertake it, and that a human round trip mission to
1998
KY26 could be completed by 2015. He not only thinks that a
manned
mission to 1998 KY26 would be easier than a manned Moon mission,
he
thinks that it would be far easier and cheaper than a manned Mars
mission.
As 1998 KY26 rotates once every
10.7 minutes, in the questioning
I asked him whether the Coriolis effect might cause problems for
any
astronauts onboard it. Steve replied that since NASA had
repeatedly
spun astronauts at 30 RPM with no ill effects, 11 RPM should
cause no
problem. He seemed unaware that NASA had spun these
astronauts at
30 RPM to duplicate the 8 G's of lift-off, and that the
astronauts
had had to endure this load for only a very few minutes.
Continuing along these lines, Steve
opined that the main purpose of
the International Space Station was to test human adaptability to
zero
gravity for manned flight to Mars. In this he seemed quite
oblivious to
the uses of ISS as a laboratory for the study of materials,
materials
processing, hydro-dynamics, and complex biochemical
compounds. Further,
in a comparison of the mass of 1998 KY26 with the ISS, (1998 KY26
has 10
times the mass of the ISS), Steve described the ISS as something
"into
which 10's of billions of dollars are being spent to go around
the Earth
endlessly in a circle."
It would appear that Steve is oblivious to the
ISS' main scientific
role. In a later cost comparison of missions to 1998 KY26 Steve
spoke
at the press conference in disparaging tones about both the Space
Shuttle and the International Space Station.
Pursuing this line of questioning with Steve
after the session, he
expressed the opinion that if the rotation was a problem the 1998
KY26
could simply be de-spun by rockets using the asteroid's own
materials as
a source for fuels. It was clear that he never considered
that it might
be more desirable to spin up 1998 KY26 in order to give crew
compartments attached to it say about 2/3 Earth's gravity, which
would
ease the change from Earth gravity to Mars' gravity and
vice-versa.
Given that Mars is going to be in the public
spotlight early next
year, and that Steve will be speaking about 1998 KY26 in this
regard, I
felt it was important that he have both a better knowledge of the
impact
hazard and the realities of manned space flight, and right then
made up
my mind that I would have to speak with him later about
these.
I accomplished these goals Wednesday night at the banquet, by
suggesting
to him that he read Mike Baillie's book on historical impacts and
Mark
Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica internet site.
The other major announcement of
the day was Dave Meisel's
announcement of the first observational confirmation of the
arrival of
heavier elements into our solar system from a supernova.
The hypothesis
that our solar system's supply of these elements had been formed
in
supernova and then drifted into the proto-system cloud has long
been put
forth: here was the first observational evidence that this was
indeed
what occurred. Dave, who usually works at CSSL Pennsylvania
State, will
be at State University of New York Geneseo for a while, and can
be
reached by those interested at ddmeteor@abac.com.
After the press conference I met
up with Deborah Zabarenko, who
was up working the conference for Reuters, a feed used by many
media
outlets, and I told her I was covering the conference for a the
Cambridge Conference Netwwork, a electronic newsletter by which a
number
of the experts in the field communicated. She asked me why
I was there, and
I told her for about $6.5 million dollars, explaining that the
asteroid detection budget had just been increased by that amount,
from
$3.5 to $10 million dollars, but that since the sponsor of the
increase,
Representative Brown had died, its passage was in doubt.
Deborah agreed
with me, pointing out that she covered a lot of big science in
Washington, and that in that context $10 million was "chump
change", and
if that's what it took to deal with it, they should do it.
This brought
to my mind a similar statement that Ted Koppel made at a
conference
earlier this year after hearing me discuss the impact problem
with Ed
Stone of JPL. These reporters are no dummies.
Deborah went on and noted how
blase the scientists were about the
threat, and I explained that a lot of them have been living with
it as
well as the lack of government funding for a long, long
time. She
wondered if Steve had been correct in describing the hazard, and
I
explained to her that no he had not, that he was unaware of the
work by
others that was being done in the area. A lot of people had
already
been killed by impactors, I told her, and I offered to put her in
contact with Mike Baillie: he would no doubt give her an
interview, as
he was pushing his new book "From Exodus to Arthur",
which set out the
number of people killed. Deborah declined my offer, telling
me she was
on tight deadline, and instead asked me for a list of suspected
impact
events causing deaths, which I provided for her off the top of my
head.
I returned to the hotel from the press
conference center and had
lunch, and as I was headed out the door I ran into my old friend
Vicky
Garshnek, who had just arrived after a 36 hour sleepless flight
from
Hawaii to give a paper dealing with handling the casualties from
an
impact event. Vicky's specialty is telemedicine, in
particular
telemedicine use by astronauts in space, and after she had read
the
original Shoemaker Report she had begun wondering if there was
any plan
on how to handle the casualties which might occur in the next
impact
event. Her first inquiry into the matter had led to her
being told that
the plan was to handle the casualties in the same manner as those
from a
large bomb, but Vicky had immediately realized that the number of
casualties from a major impact event would exceed those from one
large
bomb in a single area, and so she began to work on the
problem. She had
discussed the matter with Dr. Morisson, and he had provided
valuable
insights. She would be giving her paper the next day, and
had come to
the conclusion that given the likely size of the event
international
cooperation would be necessary both in handling the casualties as
well
as refugees from the impact area.
After the afternoon session I walked
down the hill and across
another deep ravine to the Colllegetown area to find a place to
eat.
The first establishment one comes across when entering
Collegetown is a
combination bagel bakery and bar, and this is certainly the first
one of
these that I have ever seen. I passed up on eating there
and instead
went to the Irish American bar next door, where I had a fine
steak
sandwich.
Crossing the ravine again and
walking back up the hill, I returned
to the campus. Here I ran into the young researcher from
the ESA whose
baggage Delta Airlines had lost. Despite their promises,
Delta had
still not delivered his luggage, and as he had completely run out
of
clothes he had had to spend the day shopping and had missed a
large part
of the day's sessions.
Crossing the other ravine, I returned to
my lodgings. Despite my
fatigue I found it impossible to get to rest, as for some odd
reason
every time I fell asleep I was awoken by dreams about falling
from a
great height.
DAY 2: TUESDAY, 27 JULY
"OUR JOB IS NOT TO SCARE PEOPLE...."
The day started off well.
The New York Times had run an editorial
statement noting the need for funding of the NEO detection
program. As
the day started my big problem was that the press conference on
the
recent impact scares was going to be held at the same time as
Vicky was
giving her paper. With Andrea Milani, Paul Chodas, Richard
Binzel, Alan
Harris, and David Rabinowitz on the panel I had no choice but to
miss
Vicky's paper.
As I expected, their press conference
featured a discussion of how
exactly orbits are determined, why none of the recently discussed
objects present much a of threat, and a presentation of the
Binz...
errhhh, Torino Scale. (Considering Richter's experience, Binzel
does not
want his name associated with a tragedy as large as an impact
event.)
One of the most amusing comments at the press conference was by
Paul
Chodas, who said that while he would have liked to have run
further
Monte Carlo checks on one asteroid's chances, his daughter had
wanted to
use her computer to play a video game.
Lest the headlines read "Asteroids
Present No Danger, Say Noted
Astronomers", during the question period I asked about the
panelists to
clarify exactly what they had been talking about when they used
the term
"background level". Binzel pointed out that their
estimates of the
background rates were given in the Torino Scale handout.
The problem here, though I did not bring it up
at the time, is that
the background rates they gave out are wrong. Let's look:
Class 8:
"A collision capable of causing localized destruction.
Such events
occur somewhere between once per 50 years and once per 1000
years."
Observed:
ca. 1584 BCE Destruction of Hittite forces under T'e Hantilish
(Joshua
impactor)
ca. 520 BCE Destruction of Etruscan town of Volsinii
679 AD - Destruction of Colingiham Monastery
ca. 800 AD - Impact in Baltic and death by local tsunami
ca. 1321-1368 AD Erh River fall in China
1450 AD - miss ("missed" people - no one killed) Wabar
1490 AD - Ch'ing-yang fall kills over 10,000 (possibly hail)
1868 AD - miss near Pultusk, Poland
1908 AD - miss in Tunguska
1930 AD - miss in Brazilian jungle
1947 AD - miss at Sikhote Ailin in Kamchatka
1972 AD - miss in South West Pacific
Class 9:
"A collision capable of causing regional devastation.
Such events occur
between once per 1,000 years and once per 100,000 years."
Observed:
ca. 3100 BCE - Battle of Titans(?), tsunami leading to flood
myths
580 AD - Destruction of Bordeaux region and city of Orleans
585 AD - Destruction of "two islands in the sea"
Date unknown - Destruction of Ainu
ca. 1500 AD - Australian Great Wall of Water, with collapse of
Polynesian megalithic cultures on Ponhpei and elsewhere
Class 10:
"A collision capable of causing global climatic
catastrophe. Such
events occur once per 100,000 years, or less often."
Observed:
ca. 3100 BCE?
ca. 2345 BCE
ca. 1160 BCE
ca. 536 AD
While some of these events are still in
the process of
confirmation, and may turn out to be attributable to causes other
than
impact, this short list includes no data from North America,
South
America, or Africa. Also, it is difficult to categorize
events as
either "local", "regional", or
"global", as not only is very little
currently known about the extent of the historical impact events,
the
terms "local" and "regional" are poorly
defined.
In sum, however you calculate it, the background rates given with
the
Torino Scale could very well turn out to be plain wrong, in some
cases
by several orders of magnitude: they need to be corrected.
After the full press conference,
the participants took additional
questions from the reporters individually. Interestingly,
Andrea Milani
told us that his funding came from the United States' National
Science
Foundation and was going to run out in 3 weeks. I asked
several
questions, trying to get Andrea to say something that might shame
the
government of Italy into providing more money, but the most he
would say
was that the effort needed to be international in scope.
During the press conference Andrea kept on saying "Our job
is not to
scare people, but to solve the problem." In saying
this I think that he
meant the problem of estimating an orbit for any particular
asteroid.
But if he meant the problem of finding the next Earth impactor
and doing
something about it before it hits, then people are going to have
to be
scared", or at least concerned, or they are simply not going
to pay the
money needed to do it.
STUNNING NEWS
After the press conference I had lunch in the
Statler Hotel's
basement cafeteria and then went over to post my e-mail.
After
receiving your message that you would be out until mid-August,
thus
relieving me of the duty of doing a daily dispatch, a simply
stunning
piece of news started to break.
The House Space Subcommittee had done its
first mark-up, which
trimmed the NASA budget by $1.3 billion dollars, with a most of
the cuts
coming from "space science", including of course all of
the NEO
programs. To give you some idea as to the extent of cut the
House Sub
Committee was proposing, not only had the NEO programs been hit,
they
were even proposing the cancellation of the future Mars probes,
this
only a short time after the public's celebration of Pathfinder's
incredible success.
I returned to the afternoon parallel session
on bolides to find
myself in a rather strange situation. Given that all the
conference
participants were busy with their own work at the conference, at
this
point they were completely oblivious that the House Subcommittee
had
just proposed cutting off nearly all of the money for their
projects.
The session started with a paper from Dee Pack
from the Aerospace
Corporation on the detection of recent bolide events by infra-red
sensors. From 19/7/98 to 30/3/99 there had been some 17
events in just
the Pacific, including a 12 kiloton 4.5 second burston
14/1/99. There
was a lot of work being done on trying to break out the bolides
by
source, and most of those observed during this time were
consistent with
6 to 8 meter objects on Apollo type orbits.
(Ed Tagliaferri from the Aerospace Corporation
was also there too,
and I enjoyed catching up with him before the session started.)
One of the reasons I especially went to the
bolide session was to
listen to Dr. Doug ReVelle present his research based on
declassified
data from the armed forces nuclear blast sensors. Before
the session I
had a chance to speak with Doug, and he related to me a story
which had
been told to him by Gene Shoemaker himself. Shoemaker had
told Doug
that in the mid 1960's he had been attending a conference, when
some
people from AFTAC (the Air Force Technical Assistance Command)
introduced themselves to him and asked him for his help with a
problem
they were having. The party retreated to a room back behind
the
curtains, and the AFTAC people set out the problems they were
having
with large bolides setting off their nuclear blast sensors and
asked for
his help.
I had often wondered if Gene Shoemaker had
first become aware of the
extremely high frequency of small impactors when the first data
came
down from the infra-red blast detection satellites, but now Doug
told me
it was later than this, around the mid 1960's, if what Gene
Shoemaker
told him was indeed fully accurate, and not just what he felt he
could
tell him. On Friday morning I had a further conversation
with Doug, and
he revealed even more startling news then, but I'll save that for
my
account of Friday morning. (There's nothing like suspense
to keep the
reader's interest.)
The best of Dr. ReVelle's current estimates
for bolides of differing
classes is as follows:
1 Kiloton - 5.61 per year
15 Kiloton - .844 per year
1 Megaton - 1 per 111.9 years
One of the big problems Dr. ReVelle is working
on is sorting out the
acoustic signatures between the different classes of asteroids
and
comets.
Doug's paper was followed by one from a
Russian team headed by O.P.
Popova of the Institute for the Dynamics of Geospheres. The
Russians
are working on the bolide problem by using spectral analysis to
identify
the sources for larger blasts, but are currently stumped by the
lack of
spectral differences between comets and chondrites. Also,
the Russians
are working on the problem of modeling the larger bolide blasts
themselves, but so far have just concluded that their
hydro-dynamic
models are incapable of modeling the observed blasts, and that
something
different is needed to do the job.
After the afternoon session it was back on to
the internet to try
and learn what was going on with the proposed space science
budget cut,
and then a quick dinner in the hotel bar before the evening's
poster
session. Outside of the poster sessions Michael Casper,
noted meteorite
dealer and Cornell University's Adjunct Curator of Meteorites,
had
tables with items for sale on them, including a HUGE chunk of the
newly
found Shergottite from Mars. Michael kindly let me closely
examine and
hold the chunk, and though it is similar to granite, gray with
black
inclusions, I was amazed by the fact that on Mars, with its low
gravity,
the grey matrix had simply "foamed", for lack of a
better word.
At the poster session itself, I spent most of
my time griping to
Paul Chodas about the state of impact estimates. While
theoretical
computer models were in abundance at the conference, I expressed
my
opinion to Paul that this was little more than masturbating with
a
machine, as there was very little work being presented at the
conference
dealing with real data for large impactors: there was no work
being done
on counting craters on other bodies in the solar system; there
was
nothing presented dealing with work being done with the
historical
record of Earth impacts. The estimates that were being
presented, and
which were widely taken as fact instead of estimates, do not
seem to correspond to the data that has been observed elsewhere.
Even though he certainly is not responsible
for this state of
affairs, Paul generously gave me an ear in which to vent my
frustrations. As he put it, a start has been made, but a
lot of work
remains to be done.
After the poster session I ran into my
friend from the ESA whose
luggage Delta Airlines had misplaced. He was fuming, as he
had spent
the day on the telephone listening to the "pretty"
music and being lied
to by Delta. Delta was now claiming that his luggage was in
the care of
no less than three overnight delivery services, and would
undoubtedly
show up the next day.
Returning to my lodgings from the poster
session, I moved the head
of my bed away from the window, and this had the effect which I
desired:
the dreams of falling stopped, and I was able to get a good
night's
sleep for the first time in three days.
DAY 3: WEDNESDAY, 28 JULY
SHOCKED AND STUNNED
The participants of the morning press
conference had designed it as
a way of promoting a reconsideration of the cancellation of the
Champollion project, as a presentation of Champollion had been
included
along with spokemen for the projects which had earlier been
approved.
(Gerhardt Schwem of the ESA Rosetta project was not on the panel,
but
instead was standing at the back of the room.) That their own
projects
were now in very real danger of cancellation was news that they
simply
found almost impossible to deal with, and while some tried to
conduct
the press conference as they planned from the start, the grim
reality of
the proposed cuts kept intruding.
Don Yeomans spoke about Muses-C, and being the
master showman that
he is, he had a full scale model of the micro-rover/leaper
setting on
the desk in front of him. (As Muses-C is a Japanese project
with some
US participation, the proposed budget cuts would have little
effect on
it.)
Benton Clark spoke about Stardust, but as most
have been fully
briefed on it, I won't repeat that briefing again here.
Paul Weisman from JPL spoke about the
encounter with Asteroid
Braille that Deep Space 1 was supposed to be undertaking that
very
evening, completely unaware (as was everyone there) that Deep
Space 1
had gone into safe mode that very morning. He was obviously
pained by
the cancellation of Champollion, which he attributed simply the
need for
reductions in total spending necessitated by overuns in other
sections
of the NASA budget. While overruns on the ISS certainly
played a large
role, they may not have been decisive, as Deep Impact was
approved after
the Champollion cut. Other factors such as total cost
(around $280
million), technical complexity, and limited return may also have
played
a large role in the decision to terminate Champollion.
Bob Farquhar from John Hopkins spoke about the
bi-propellant system
failure on NEAR, and pointed out that NEAR's new encounter with
asteroid
Eros would take place somewhat fittingly on Valentine's Day,
2000.
Touching indirectly upon the subject of the proposed cuts, Bob
pointed
out that the average cost for the proposed missions would be
around $210
million.
Cornell's own Joe Veverke spoke next about
Contour, and as Harvard's
Fred Whipple had arrived by now, Dr. Veverke was pleased to
announce
that Dr. Whipple was joining the Contour team. Under normal
circumstances this would have been the media announcement of the
day,
but the circumstances were far from normal, and there was simply
not
going to be any way around them.
Mike Ahearn of University of Maryland spoke
about Deep Impact. The
name "Deep Impact" was actually developed for the probe
long before the
movie, and the similarity may be attributable to chance, though
the
producers of the movie were in constant contact with NASA for
technical
advice. Deep Impact has huge mass margins, is technically
simple, and
promises a large science return. There will be great
international
involvement, as the use of many observatories will be required to
assure
that the impact with the asteroid is recorded. Furthermore,
the impact
should be so large that amateur astronomers in the Southern
Hemisphere
should be able to see it.
When it went to question and answer
time, discussion first centered
on the selection of projects on the criterion of how fast they
could
return results. As the House Sub-committee had just
proposed cutting
out all the missions entirely, it seemed to me that the
presenters were
avoiding the issue immediately at hand. I knew that these
people needed
to speak frankly about the budget cuts that were (and still are)
being
proposed: they had not faced up to them all morning, being in a
shocked
state of denial.
Thus I got ready to play a game I call
soft ball. This is where I
pitch an easy question real slowly to a presenter with the
intention
that he knock it out of the park. (Of course, on occasion I'll
sneak in
a burning fast ball near to the plate, but not this
morning.) I asked
the panel whether the budget cuts might lead to greater
international
cooperation with the Europeans and the Japanese to accomplish the
science goals. Dr. Veverke snapped off, "I think that
the two things
are completely unrelated." It was clear that he was
angry, and it was
though I had proposed the budget cuts myself on the excuse that
the
research results could be had cheaper from foreign sources.
I fumbled
and then asked Don for a comment, and Don answered that as you
could see
from looking at the conference attendance, there was a great deal
of
cooperation going on already. Don pointed out that the
budget
negotiations were in the first round, and to defuse the tension
he joked
that it was likely to be a case where first they propose to cut
off your
hand, and then when they propose to cut off only a couple of
fingers,
you're thankful for it.
This was the answer I was looking for,
and it broke the ice. Now
the panel began to talk realistically about the proposed drastic
budget
cuts. Dr. Veverke added that my question had implied that
without the
pressure of the budget cuts bring there would be no
cooperation. He
pointed out that European instruments were proposed to fly on
Contour,
and that if it was canceled he would have to go to them and tell
them
that they couldn't fly there instruments anymore.
This was what I had been trying to elicit with
my first pitch, but
as Veverke did not state it clearly, I finally ended up asking
him
directly, "So, then, there already is a great deal of
international
cooperation and the instruments fly when space becomes
available?". Dr.
Veverke answered simply "Yes", but one of the other
panel members then
went on to explain that the Champollion lander had originally
been a
joint US-French proposal for Rosetta, but that NASA funding had
been
inadequate to meet the Rosetta schedule. His conclusion was
that if the
United States wanted to cooperate it would need funds to do it,
and he
listed joint programs currently underway.
The moderator then asked about
cooperation with Russia, and Dr.
Veverke responded that we are sending them a lot of money to
build
components for the ISS which they don't deliver and we then have
to
build back home. Though Dr. Veverke is quite right to be
angry with the
Russians for failing to keep their commitments on ISS, and is
quite
right is thinking that their failure has led in part to the
proposed
NASA budget reductions, I am of the opinion that there is little
to be
gained from expressing it.
First, direct additional payments
to Russia for the Service Module
amount to $60 million, with another $100 million being suggested
to buy
Progress supply flights. While some of the $1.2 billion
space station
slippage expense may be attributable to the Russians, a major
share of
this could just as well be attributed to US manufacturer delays
in
providing modules. If, and only if, the US decides to go it
alone will
space station costs rise higher, and Goldin put off issuing
contracts
for US replacement components as long as he could. But
Congress
demanded that these be put in place now, and that work on these
be
started. Second, there is nothing NASA opponents like more
than to see
space scientists fighting with the manned space side: reductions
in the
manned space side do not lead to more money for space science,
but
instead to the opposite: space science gets reduced too.
Another of the panelists pointed out
that while significant
earlier, Russian space science was dead at the moment, as they
had more
pressing problems to deal with. Attempting to divert anger
away from
Russian failure, I asked Paul Wesiman about the cuts which had
occurred
before this.
A follow-up question about the
selection of the programs elicited
a response (from Dr. Veverke, I think, but my tape is not of
sufficient
quality to be sure) that all the programs together formed a
graduated
step approach to acquiring knowledge of asteroids and meteorites,
and
that Contour fit in with this step by step approach. This
seemed to be
a return to the theme that the panel had originally hoped to
convey: the
projects formed a stepped approach, and Champollion fit in to
those
steps. But this morning's reality was that thanks to the
House Space
Subcommittee the entire stairway was now in jeopardy, and the
panel
moderator quickly pointed that out by adding the Mars and Mercury
probes
to the list of projects.
In the end, Fred Whipple turned out to
be the star of the morning's
session, though for reasons no one on the panel had ever
anticipated.
Taking the opportunity provided by a question concerning the
desire for
a sample return mission, Whipple started by pointing out that he
had
been around since the very beginnings of the space program, from
satellites through to Apollo. It was a shame to be asking
for pennies
to continue work on comets, especially since they hit the Earth
all the
time. Whipple reeled off a list of those Earth impact
events he knew
about, such as Tunguska and Sikote Ailin, discussed the
possibility of
tsunami's such as those they had seen in "Deep Impact",
and then told
everyone that this was a real danger that they needed to deal
with, and
that they would simply have to spend the money to deal with it.
Another of the panelists immediately
followed Whipple's lead and
expanded upon his remarks, noting that the whole program cost
about 70
cents per year, with each individual probe costing a $1 per US
citizen,
about the cost of 2 small candy bars (another panelist
interjected that
that was now the cost of one large candy bar), or 1/2 of a
Big Mac.
God bless him: Ninety two years old,
Whipple immediately and
squarely faces up to the reality of the proposed budget cuts,
explains
to the audience in very simple terms why the research is
important to
them, and tells them how much it will cost. By doing thus
he also
provided an opportunity for others to make even more statements
framing
the problem in a way that the public could understand.
Reviewing the results, my advice
to Dr. Veverke is to let Dr.
Whipple handle the press side of things for Contour: The way
senior
scientists get to be senior scientists is by getting funding for
their
projects.
After the session I had a chance to
speak with Mike Ahearn, and he
gave me some interesting background on Deep Impact. Some
years back
NASA had rejected the original proposal for the spacecraft, and
at that
point its principle designer had asked Mike to take it
over. Interest
in the asteroid threat had then grown, and now entirely
unexpectedly
Mike found himself in charge of the one asteroid and comet
project which
has the greatest chance of surviving the budget cuts, should they
be
voted through by the full House and Senate.
After the morning press conference I had
lunch and proceeded to get
onto the internet to learn more about the proposed NASA budget
cuts.
Despite Don's assuring evaluation that morning that the process
was
still in the preliminary stages, I myself was not so assured, and
expected (and am still expecting) a fight ahead.
THE BANQUET
On the way to the banquet I met Dr. Binzel, and had
a chance to ask
him about a problem with the Torino scale which Clark Chapman and
I had
discussed at the initial reception on Sunday: the Torino Scale
lacks any
time frame. For example, let's say you have a Class 9
alert: Is the
regional devastation going to take place a month from now, or a
decade
away? Binzel told me that the classes were to be applied on
a 100 year
time frame: his response reflects in a major way his
understanding of
the impact threat.
Over hors d'ouvres I had a chance to
speak with Steve Ostro about
impact rates and manned flight, as I mentioned earlier.
Entertainment
by the Purple Valley Band had been arranged by Cornell's own
science
support staffer Rick Kline, and he gave a fine performance on the
Yamaha
five string bass.
Among my dinner companions was Dr.
Narender K. Chandel, who has
been working through the ancient Indian records of cometary
appearances,
and Dr. Chandel related to me the state of work in India.
From about
200 BCE to about 600 AD Indian astronomers made long detailed
records of
cometary appearances, and there are other records describing
events
before this time period which stretch back to hoary antiquity,
often in
the form of four line quatrains, using poetic language to
describe the
comets. It seems that the Indian National Academy of
Science had been
sponsoring the translation of these ancient records, but several
years
ago they had stopped the funding for this, with work on several
texts in
various stages of completion. I asked Narender if the texts
were
available as electronic files: he told me that they had not been
converted to that form yet, and went on to detail the state of
work on
them: several had been fully translated, but not published;
several had
been partially translated, with no final working text.
Dr. Chandel can be reached at nchandel@mailcity.com,
and while he
has generously offered to send off-prints of his own articles by
fax and
cover the costs himself, I'd like to suggest to the Conference
members
that if they contact him they offer to provide funds to cover his
mail
and copying expenses. Also, as near as I understand the
situation, it
would take minimal clerical and scanning costs to complete the
earlier
work of Indian National Academy of Science on the ancient texts
and make
them widely available in electronic form: something say on
the order of
$100-$200 for each text. At these kind of prices some
Conference
participants may want to consider financing this work either on
an
institutional or private basis.
Since coverage already exists for
historical and myth records from
the Ancient Near East, China, the Pacific Basin, and North and
South
America (at least I hope so), Narender's work adds India to the
list,
with only Africa missing. While we have had one report from
French
colonial Africa, to my knowledge there is no one working through
the
African historical and myth records proper. In point of
fact it is much
to be regretted that there was only one African American at the
ACM
conference, and I personally regret not getting an opportunity to
speak
with him to see if he might be of help.
After dinner I saw Don Yeomans and spoke
with him briefly about
Deep Space 1 going into safe mode that very morning, with the
closest
approach to asteroid Braille scheduled to take place that very
evening.
Returning to the hotel, I learned that the spacecraft had only
been
partially recovered by the time of the Braille encounter.
As I left from the hotel I once again
ran into my friend from the
ESA whose luggage Delta Arilines had misplaced. Despite
Delta's most
recent promises, his luggage had still not arrived: he was
livid by
now, and wanted to sue them. I suggested to him that under
international baggage agreements the most he might be able to get
from
Delta would only be partial compensation, and that his best
course of
action might be to contact his travel agent back home about
bringing
suit in an European court, as the Delta representatives here in
the US
were clearly worse than useless.
DAY 4: THURSDAY, 29 JULY
NEAR MISSES
In the morning word came in that Deep
Space 1 had only been
recovered enough to provide images after its closest encounter
with
Braille. While Deep Space 1 had demonstrated a number of
the
technologies that are going to be necessary for asteroid or
cometary
diversion or destruction, the bottom line is that if either
diversion or
destruction had been necessary, the attempt would have failed,
and we'd
now be going the way of the dinosaur. Just my opinion, but
while
missions such as Contour are going to be really helpful in
nailing down
the composition of threatening comets, and thus determining the
size of
the necessary charges and details of their firing, intercept
technology
development and demonstration missions like Deep Impact should
have the
highest priority.
The morning sessions were pretty quiet,
and I took the opportunity
this presented to drop back onto the net to see how the fight to
prevent
the cutbacks in NASA's budget was going. The Mars faction
of US space
enthusiasts had been raising all hell about the House
Subcommittee's
proposal to cut future Mars landers, and Boeing had not been too
happy
either about the loss of sales of Delta launchers. In
response to their
pleas one of the Republican leaders, Rep. Walker I think, came up
with a
new proposal: eliminate Americorps, President Clinton's own
employment
program for inner city Afro-American and rural poor young people,
and
give the $400 million to NASA for Mars probes. By doing
this his intent
was clearly either to bring space supporters into opposition with
President Clinton, or President Clinton into opposition with
NASA, and
most likely both.
Despite his effort, cries of pain
as well as direct threats were
now being heard by those on the sub-committee, and it was clear
that the
Republicans had made a major political error by proposing to cut
the
NASA budget by such a large amount, thus allowing Clinton and by
association Vice President Gore to appear as NASA's champions,
despite
their earlier lukewarm support for the agency.
OBSERVATIONAL BIASES
The topic for the afternoon sessions was
observational bias, and
several major papers were given, of which two deserve special
mention
here.
G. B. Valsecchi of the IAS Planetlogia Rome
gave a paper ascribing
the Taurid complex to three biases. The first bias is that
secular
perturbations induce a certain degree of alignment of the
osculating w
of main belt asteroids to that of Jupiter, located at w ~ 13; the
second
bias is induced by the density of stellar backgrounds from the
Galactic
Plane; and the third bias comes from the +30 - +60 latitudes at
which
observations are made and their time of year, April through
October.
I have my own theory of Taurid bias, one based not
on observation
errors but instead on human character. I think that Clube
and Napier
focused on a hypothesis of the breakup of one comet out of human
nature.
For if the impact events the historical records describe actually
are
attributable to many different objects, instead of to the breakup
of one
particular comet, then we are indeed in deep kimchi, as they
say. And
clearly if these impact events are not time bound to the breakup
of this
one comet, then the only reason for the current quiet period is
simple
statistical fluke.
David Rabinowitz of JPL presented some
analysis of the new NEAT data
that he has been working on with Eleanor Helin. (I was told
that Dr.
Helin was unable to make it to the ACM due to a recent leg injury
and
that she had just reached the stage of hobbling around on
crutches back
home. I'm sure all here wish her a speedy recovery.)
One of the most remarkable things about their
study was the claim of
reliable recoveries down to H=23, diameter 100 meters or so,
whereas
most will only claim reliable recoveries down to H=20, or maybe
H=20.5
on a really good night. Their new equation is N(H) ~
e**0.9H, giving
750+_250 Near Earth Asteroids for H<18. If this is
right, then they
calculate that we may be able to recover most of the larger
(diameter 1
kilometer or greater) potential impactors within ten years,
provided
that the budget for the detection effort is doubled.
On a more personal note, it must follow that
if Rabinowitz and
Helin's new asteroid estimates are right, then from the
historical data
we must infer that long period comets present a much, much
greater
threat to man than has previously been realized. This will
then of
necessity entail a new observational challenge of an entirely
different
sort, and the necessity of developing observational programs to
deal
with it. The only other alternative conclusion possible
would be that
the impact effects of smaller impactors, those with magnitude
H>23, has
been severely underestimated, which is not too likely.
During the break I once again heard bitching
and moaning about the
Minor Planet Center's "Secret File", in other words the
unconfirmed one
time observations. Once again I quickly ascertained that
absolutely no
one wants to take Brian Marsden's job, put in the longer hours,
as well
as put up with the grief from all the orbit calculators out
there. And
as if Brian does not have enough to do, some at the ACM also
proposed
that the Minor Planet Center begin search coordination
functions. For
some reason it does not seem to have occurred to these people
that maybe
they ought to do this themselves.
DID YOU HEAR THE ONE
ABOUT THE TRAVELING SALESLADY?
After the afternoon sessions I went to the
hotel bar to get a bite
to eat before the evening's poster sessions. After
finishing dinner,
while nursing a soda waiting for the poster session to
begin, I began a
conversation with an attractive blonde, or rather I should say
that she
struck up a conversation with me.
She told me she was from Philadelphia,
and had come to Cornell on a
sales call. As it was too late to get a plane back home,
she had
decided to spend the night. In my reply, I lied, and told
her that I
was a journalist up covering the wanker scientists who were
meeting at
the hotel. Her reply was remarkable, and I repeat it here
in full:
"Ooooh, I know. I saw them out in the
lobby."
Continuing along, our saleslady
mentioned that she had not seen her
husband for three weeks, as her husband was a salesman too, and
had also
been traveling on business.
"Ah, then, Absence makes the heart grow
fonder?", I jested.
"No, not exactly.", she replied.
"Perhaps then its a case of absence makes
the heart go wander?"
"Something more like that."
I found it somewhat flattering when our
saleslady expressed regret
when I told her that I had to go back to work and up to the
evening's
poster session. I wish that I could claim to you that I
made some great
sacrifice that evening on the behalf of the study of impact
events, but
the simple fact of the matter is that I have not yet fallen to
Cousin
Todd's level, and don't fool around with married women.
That evening's poster session was quite
remarkable. Frank
Kinsmore, Monroe Community College, retired, who has been working
on the
Finger Lakes as impact structures, presented another new
hypothesis of
his: That the Lake Michigan-Lake Huron ring was the world's
biggest
visible impact crater. If you trace the curve formed by the
eastern
shore of the state of Wisconsin through to the archipelago that
is the
upper part of the state of Michigan, it forms an almost perfect
curve;
and as we know there is only one way that perfect curves of that
size
have been formed on Earth: through impact events. In
Kinsman's view,
Michigan itself forms the uplift in the center of the impact
crater,
with Ontario's Lake Huron shore forming the crater's eastern
edge.
Kinsman compares the structure with that of Brent Crater, which
is very
similar in form, but not size.
I stopped briefly at Tom van Flandern's
poster, where he suggested
that Mars may be a surviving moon of Planet-X, the destruction of
which
by impact has been proposed as a source of the asteroids and thus
of
meteorites as well. It has been often and widely pointed
out that the
gravitational field of Jupiter would prevent the formation of
Planet-X
in that particular orbit, but in the time since the ACM
Conference it
has been announced that Jupiter is now not in the orbit it was in
originally, so the problem must now be considered anew. For
the time
being, I agreed with Gunter Kargl and Axel Hagerman, who
explained that
the relative lack of craters in Mars' northern hemisphere is most
likely
attributable to Mars having had only one thermo-convective flow
earlier
in its history: Axel's girlfriend models Mars' convective flows,
and
that is her specialty.
Moving on, I had a really good chat with John
Brownlee of the
Catalina Sky Survey. John's poster was on the efficiencies
of different
methods of automatically detecting asteroids and comets in CCD
output
data, and as he was focused very much on the working level, I
found my
conversation most interesting and very efficient. John
described the
computers and network system that he had available, as well as
the
problems he was hitting with noise and poor sky charts at
magnitude 20.5
or so. From what he said, it is clear to me that sky charts
are going
to have to be improved if smaller NEOs are going to be detected
by Earth
based telescopes.
John had done the work on detection
algorithm efficiencies on his
own, while at the same time taking care of all the ordinary day
to day
business at Catalina, and like every other system programmer I
know of
in a similar situation he was putting in ungodly hours each week,
week
after week, and month after month, with no end in sight. On
a more
positive note Grant Stokes of Linear had taken John under his
wing, so
there will be at least one more scientist available for work on
automatic detection algorithms. John mentioned in passing
that new
CCDs may be available for U.S. telescopes in the near future.
I stopped at Narender's poster briefly as the
session ended, made my
apology to him for going off to pollute the temple, and proceeded
down
to the hotel bar with the two Saranac ales that I had stashed
away under
a table. (From their comments I'm sure that all the
attendees were most
favorably impressed by the fine New York wines that Cornell had
selected
for the conference, as well as be the extremely fine Saranac
beer. Even
my German friends Gunter and Axel had been impressed by it.)
On the way to the bar I once again met
up with the ESA researcher
whose baggage Delta Airlines had misplaced. He had finally
managed to
get an e-mail through to his travel agent in Germany, but due the
time
differences he could expect no reply until the next day. By
that time
it would make no difference, as he was scheduled to leave by
then.
The hotel bartender assured me that
there was no problem with
bringing the Saranac beers into the bar, and also told me that
our
saleslady had left for the evening accompanied by another fellow
from
the bar. I settled down, turned on CNN, and learned that
some
Republicans had broken ranks and that the tax cut proposal had
been
defeated. Finally there was at last hope that the proposed
NASA budget
cuts would not be forced through and set in stone, but that
instead
there would be time to organize a proper fight against them.
DAY 5: FRIDAY, 30 JULY
THE SECRET CATASTROPHIST
As there were no papers that I wanted to
hear until David Speidel's
analysis of the distribution of Earth craters, which was
scheduled for
later in the day, I began my morning with coffee and cigarettes
at the
tables outside the hotel entrance. I was soon joined by
Gunter Kargl
and Axel Hagerman from Rosetta, and an Italian researcher soon
stopped
by to ask Gunter about the instrument review he was scheduled to
make
for Mars Express.
After Gunter had finished talking with
her, we picked up our
conversation where we had left off. I stressed the
importance of
getting an accurate crater history for Mars, and Gunter told me
about a
very good German effort begin undertaken by a group in
Berlin. Gunter
was mildly critical of their effort, as he did not see how they
could
possibly use crater erosion data to estimate the amount of time
that had
passed since the original impact. Personally, it sounds to
me a whole
lot better than anything that NASA is doing.
We chatted some more about various things, but then it was time
for
Gunter and Axel to leave, as they had to get ready for their
return
trip. Almost immediately after Gunter and Axel left, Don
Yeomans showed
up and joined me. I had the great pleasure of telling Don
about the
defeat of the tax cut proposal the previous day. Don left,
but as Don
was returning to the session, Dr. ReVelle joined me.
What Dr. ReVelle told me is REALLY BIG
NEWS which I'm sure will
come as a complete surprise to many Cambridge Conference
members. It
has been widely rumored that back in 1994 President Clinton was
awoken
at 4 AM due to a high altitude blast in the Pacific. This
rumor may now
be moved into the fact category: It turns out that not only
President
Clinton, but also Vice President Gore, received that same 4 AM
wake up
call from the Sky Gods. Since then, Dr. ReVelle told me,
Vice President
Gore has worked closely with him to make the old acoustic sensor
data
available to the scientific community.
As if this was not enough, Dr. ReVelle then
went on to tell me that
the reason AFTAC had been so desperate to get Gene Shoemaker's
help back
in the mid 1960's was that in those days every time there was an
airburst, the Air Force had had to scramble the strategic bombing
fleet
and keep them flying on standby for hours on end. In those
days the
satellites were limited in coverage and subject to failure, and
vulnerable to attack, and so the acoustic sensors had been a
major part
of the United States' early warning system.
I brought up the subject of the current arms
race in developing
countries: while launch officers in the United States, Russia,
and
China are all trained about the NEO problem, launch officers in
the
newly armed developing nations are nearly completely ignorant of
it.
Dr. ReVelle noted that back during the Persian Gulf War we had
come
about 5 hours from disaster, as if an airburst which had occurred
over
the Pacific during that time had occurred over Israel, all hell
would
have broken loose. We agreed that something needed to be
done.
So that's the BIG NEWS, Benny: Vice President
Gore is a closet
catastrophist. This may sound like a lot, but you have to
remember that
an earlier Vice President once compared the job to drinking a
warm glass
of spit. From my interviews at the American Astronautical
Society
meeting earlier this year with staffers from the Office of
Management
and Budget, I learned that there had been no internal Whitehouse
discussion of the cancellation of Clementine II: whatever
Gore's
concern's were about the NEO problem, he was completely out of
the
Whitehouse-OMB loop when the vital decision on Clementine II had
had to
be made. Of course, it is always possible that Gore spoke
about it with
President Clinton, who in turn then must have totally ignored
Gore's
advice.
Having gotten pounded for his concerns
about CFCs and the ozone
layer, and about the production of green house gases, Gore is
simply
unwilling to publicly come out and talk about the NEO problem for
fear
of being labeled as a kook or science wonk once again. But
in the end
on this, even though we're all working as hard as we can on
essentially
no money, and even though we have just begun research on smaller
historical impacts, the fault lies with us: our data is simply
not firm
enough at this time for Gore to come out publicly and tell the
people of
the United States that NEOs are a very real and very serious
problem and
that were going to have to spend money to deal with it.
All in all, you're better off having a
Representative like George
Brown looking after your interests rather than a Vice
President. Of
course, if Gore does become President, things might change.
But right
now Gore is still lagging George Bush Jr. in the polls, despite
Bush's
problems with drug issues, and Bush's understanding of the NEO
problem
is simply unknown.
Talking with Dr. ReVelle I missed David
Speidel's talk on his study
of impact craters, but I soon caught up with him and he
generously sat
down with me at the tables outside the hotel entrance and
presented it
again to me personally. Based upon the distribution of
crater sizes,
Dave estimates that Earth craters have been formed by two
distinct
populations. One (myself at least) might see these
populations as
having been a group of original large asteroids and a group of
smaller
asteroids created by collisions among the larger ones. Dave
tells me
that Clark Chapman doesn't agree with him about this at
all: I don't
know how you feel, but I personally would pay good money to see
Clark
give a paper on crater size distribution to a group of
geologists.
One of the most interesting things that David
told me was that we
know the composition of the impactors for only 8 of the 152 large
Earth
craters. The Canadian Geological Survey was working on
this, but then
several years back the Canadian government cut off their
funding. Its a
familiar song, one we all know the lyrics to, now just where have
we
heard it before? The Australian version sung by the mates
while
drinking their beers? The British Gilbert and Sullivan
operetta
version? The French chanson, with its dusky tones?
Certainly there's
a Russian version, good to dance to; it's popular in Eastern
Europe as
well. Oh my, who can forget the wailng of that strange
Indian
adaptation! And then there's that always popular Italian
version, with
its upbeat melody and catchy timing.
What the hell, are these guys all
waiting for the US to pick up the
bill?
David has copies of his work available,
and he can be reached at
Queen's College of the City University of New York at speidel@qc.edu.
By now I was exhausted and simply sat
outside the hotel waiting for
the buses to leave, carrying some of the ACM attendees off to a
lake
cruise dinner. I already had gotten more information than I
could
absorb, and despite the opportunity the lake cruise presented,
simply
needed time to digest what I had already picked up.
My friend from the ESA whose baggage
Delta Airlines had lost
greeted me as he started out of the hotel on his return trip to
Europe.
His travel agent had called Delta, and they had responded
quickly,
assuring him that they would pay everything that they were
required to
pay anyway: 50% of the value of the clothes they had lost for
him.
There would be no payment for the lost time, the inconvenience,
the
general mess Delta had made of his trip. I suggested to him
that he
immediately file a claim stating the value of his lost clothing
as high
as possible, but he declined. These things happen you see;
it was
already too late; and nothing was left of his anger except
resignation
to the situation. His own resignation reminded me in many
ways of NEO
researchers looking at their funding situation.
My own conclusion was that whenever you
have to fly Delta be sure
to carry your valuables and essentials onboard with you.
On the way back to my lodgings I ran
into Deborah from Reuter's,
who was sneaking off with her husband and children to a
restaurant
where, as she put it, the scientists would not show up. One
week was
enough, in her opinion, and in mine as well by now. I
returned to my
lodgings, showered, and headed out for a quiet dinner, followed
by
another fine performance by Rick Kline and the Purple Valley Band
at the
Number Nine Bar in Collegetown.
On my way back to my lodgings I stopped
in once again at the hotel
bar to check up yet once more time on how the budget battle was
proceeding. Entirely by accident, I ran into a C-Span
re-broadcast of
the Capitol memorial service for George Brown which had been held
earlier in the week. His widow got up to speak: Benny, she
is a full 30
years younger than he was, and she spoke very movingly about how
they
had met when she was a college student.
I sure am going to miss him.
My conclusions about the various topics
brought up at the ACM have
already been given at the points at which they were raised during
the
conference. As for the ACM itself, there had been some
discussion of
splitting it up further by asteroids, comets, and meteors, but
I'm not
so sure this would be such a good idea. One thing for sure,
I'd like to
see a complete session added which would be entirely dedicated to
work
on Earth impact events: You know, these things aren't just
theoretical
anymore.
Best wishes -
Ed