a WISE word -- keep looking for NEOs

OK, we lead off with an article about WISE -- that's the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer -- finding an asteroid. Apparently it's expected to be good at this.

NASA's WISE spies near-earth asteroid

On Jan. 14, the WISE mission began its official survey of the entire sky in infrared light, one month after it rocketed into a polar orbit around Earth from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. By casting a wide net, the mission will catch all sorts of cosmic objects, from asteroids in our own solar system to galaxies billions of light-years away. Its data will serve as a cosmic treasure map, pointing astronomers and telescopes, such as NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, to the most interesting finds.

WISE is expected to find about 100,000 previously unknown asteroids in our main asteroid belt, a rocky ring of debris between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It will also spot hundreds of previously unseen near-Earth objects.

By observing infrared light, WISE will reveal the darkest members of the near-Earth object population -- those that don't reflect much visible light.

This is good for the following reason: Congress told NASA to look for NEOs (near-Earth objects, that is) and they didn't give them much money to do that.

Avoiding planetary hits is a big job

The report says the $4 million the U.S. spends annually to search for NEOs is insufficient to meet a congressionally mandated requirement to detect NEOs that could threaten Earth.

Congress mandated in 2005 that NASA discover 90 percent of NEOs whose diameter is 140 meters or greater by 2020, and asked the National Research Council in 2008 to form a committee to determine the optimum approach to doing so. In an interim report released last year, the committee concluded that it was impossible for NASA to meet that goal, since Congress has not appropriated new funds for the survey nor has the administration asked for them.

Earth not properly protected from asteroids

An early draft of the report, entitled "Defending the Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard-Mitigation Strategies," was released in August 2009. The final report, written by a committee of expert scientists, says NASA is ill-equipped to catalogue 90 percent of the nearby asteroids that are 460 feet (140 meters) across or larger as directed by Congress.

The United States should also be planning more methods of defending Earth against an asteroid threat in the near-term. Nuclear weapons should be a last resort – but they're also only useful if the world has years of advance notice of a large, incoming space rock, the report states.

And as if to remind us that BIG rocks are out there:

Meteorites Crashes Through Virginia Doctor's Office

"It went through the roof. It through one wall partition and then passed through a particle board ceiling into the floor of an examination room," said Linda Welzenbach, manager of the meteorite collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which confirmed that the object was indeed a meteorite from outer space. "It's not really big. It's about the size of your fist."

It may be small, but the space rock packed a big wallop when it struck the doctor's office at up to 200 mph, Welzenbach told SPACE.com. It broke apart when it hit the concrete floor of the examination room, she added.

I know it's getting harder and harder to get an appointment...