DEFENDING THE EARTH FROM LONG-PERIOD COMETS AND SNEAKY ASTEROIDS: SHORT TERM THREAT RESPONSE REQUIRES LONG TERM...

Comets, such as the recent Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) can impact terrestrial planets with very short warning times: for Siding Spring the time from discovery to closest approach to Mars (135,000 km) was less than 22 months. Short warning times are also possible for certain asteroids approaching on unfavorable orbits, e.g., from the direction of the Sun. The time required to design, build, test and launch a high-reliability Interceptor spacecraft is on the order of 5 years, a timescale incompatible with threat mitigation for such short warning times. A potential solution is to build the interceptor before the threat is detected and put it into storage until it is required. Launch of a stored spacecraft could be accomplished in much less than a year after authorization based on experience with the DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) program managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. While asteroidal impacts are of order 100 times more likely than cometary impacts, comet impacts can carry more than 100 times the energy of a typical asteroid threat, making their destructive power nearly equal. Cometary threats have been largely ignored to date, a situation that needs to change as our Planetary Defense efforts become more mature. An idealized threat response system will be described.