Friday, December 2, 2016

Hope nothing happens before then




The U.S. military, specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has just finished building and testing a new telescope designed to track space junk and small asteroids, for two primary reasons:

1.  To anticipate and hopefully prevent collisions of junk with things that are valuable;

and

2.  To keep track of things big enough to hit Earth with dangerous consequences.

The problem is, now that it's been built and tested, it has to get shipped to Australia and rebuilt, and maybe it'll be ready to start looking for space rocks and space junk in 2020.  That is, provided Donald Trump doesn't think space junk and killer asteroids are a Chinese hoax and cuts off the funding.

I don't see that happening, but you never know with The Donald.

DARPA's SST spans the sky for asteroids



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