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What Spaceguard did

Nature volume 453, pages 1178–1179 (2008)Cite this article

A survey of large objects near Earth has shown that there is little risk of a cataclysmic impact in the next century. Alan Harris asks if such cataloguing efforts should continue.

The idea was slow to catch on within NASA, but by May 1998, Carl Pilcher, the Science Director of Solar System Exploration in the NASA Office of Space Science, testified before the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of US Congress that “NASA is committed to achieving the goal of detecting and cataloguing 90% of NEOs larger than 1 kilometre in diameter within ten years”. This for many was the formal start of Spaceguard, so it is appropriate, a decade later, to ask whether its goals have been met. The pedantic answer is no, but in terms of risk reduction — or more precisely, knowing whether an impact will, or will not, occur in our lifetimes — Spaceguard identified a fraction of NEOs responsible for more than 90% of the potential impact risk, and found that impacts from that fraction pose a negligible risk in the next 50–100 years. The remaining short-term risk is almost entirely from any remaining un-discovered NEOs. In that sense, the Spaceguard Survey has been a remarkable success.

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Figure 1: Estimate of the cumulative population of near-Earth objects (NEOs) versus size.
Figure 2

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  1. Alan Harris is a senior research scientist with the Space Science Institute, 4603 Orange Knoll Avenue, La Canada, California 91011-3364, USA.,

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See Editorial, page 1143 , and News Features, pages 1157 and 1165 .

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Harris, A. What Spaceguard did. Nature 453, 1178–1179 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/4531178a

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