Planetary defense: A new hot market.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Technology Tomorrow

* If there is one thing more important than national defense, it's planetary defense.

There are objects in outer space that could potentially wipe out humanity and they are not malevolent little green men in spaceships. They are asteroids and comets, and a bigger than average sized one striking Earth would be the equivalent of the United States, Russia, China and the whole rest of the "club" popping off all their nukes at once.

With little fanfare, NASA in January opened up its planetary defense coordination office with a mandate to identify potential chunks of rock hurdling toward Earth and to stop them if possible.

The 2016 budget, which was recently passed, allocated $50 million this year alone for the office, five times what has been budgeted for detection and mitigation of "near-Earth" objects in the past.

Big defense contractors--particularly those involved in space such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman--will most likely be seeking contracts in this emerging new defense market. If a mission is needed to stop a killer asteroid, $50 million will be a drop in the bucket.

How real is the threat?

There are more than 13,500 near-Earth objects of various sizes that have been spotted to date. That doesn't count the ones that have not been discovered, a NASA news release states.

In short, they have struck Earth before, and it's impossible to rule out that it will never happen again. The history of near-Earth objects striking Earth is writ all over the face of the planet. The Chicxulub Crater buried beneath the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico is suspect number one as the object that killed off the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. The crater is 100 miles long, 12 miles deep and is only the second largest one found on Earth. Scientists speculate that it caused mega-tsunamis, covered the world in ash, radically altered the atmosphere and created dust that blotted out the sun.

So is 66 million years "just a blink of an eye" in geological terms, or are we overdue for another impact?

A reminder that we are at the mercy of the cosmos arrived in Russia on Feb. 15, 2013, when the Chelyabinsk meteor came skimming across the upper atmosphere and exploded before reaching the ground. It weighed approximately 10,000 metric tons and had gone undetected. The effects of the shockwave injured more than 1,500 victims and caused widespread damage. If it had arrived at a different trajectory, the results would have been far worse.

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