On 18th September 2000 two extraordinary things happened. Firstly the British minister for science and technology, Lord Sainsbury, launched the report of the British government's Near Earth Object Task Force at a press conference in London.
The report not only verified the NEO impact threat to the UK, but also made 14 robust and clear recommendations for government action.
Secondly, no one laughed at him.
These were just two milestones in an ongoing story that began in July 1994.
At that time the press was full of the impending collisions between Jupiter and Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, and it wasn't a great leap of intellect to wonder what would happen were something similar to occur on Earth. After seeing the results of the collisions on Jupiter through an 8” Celestron in Wyoming out of idle curiosity I decided that I would find out what was planned for such an eventuality and I began to dig, but the more that I dug, the less I found.
Using the Internet I contacted a number of the experts in the field, including Mark Bailey, Duncan Steel, Andrea Carusi, Gene Shoemaker and Tom Gehrels. Thanks to their help and advice I was able to put together a paper for the Ministry of Defence (then my employers), which was submitted in March 96. The response was not very encouraging, mainly because no one knew what to do with it or who was responsible.
In June 96 the COSPAR Asteroids, Comets and Meteorites conference was held in Versailles. This was a grand opportunity to meet many of the key players in the field face to face, and to discuss the NEO threat with many of them. With their help I turned the original paper into a more formal proposal for the Secretary of State for Defence and the Minister for Science and Technology. Everyone I spoke to was incredibly helpful and supportive, but I think that there was a general feeling that my efforts would come to naught - hardly surprising; a dabbling amateur is not much to go on.
At the same conference the Spaceguard Foundation was officially launched, and I became its first amateur member.
On 21 June 1996 the proposal was submitted to the Secretary of State for Defence and the Minister for Science and Technology. It suggested the establishment of a small coordinating centre to collate and assess the data produced by other institutions and nations.
The Ministry of Defence was advised by its experts that, as the UK doesn’t have the capability to launch a mission to deflect an asteroid or comet on its own, there is no requirement for early warning of a potential impact. On this basis the MoD refused to become involved in any project to detect NEOs, or even to assess the threat to the national security of the UK. Despite the obvious lunacy of the advice given to the Secretary of State, the Ministry was unwilling to reconsider its decision, and made it clear that any further correspondence on the subject would not be welcome. This attitude annoyed me greatly.
However, one result of the proposal was an informal meeting at Herstmonceux on 8th of August hosted by the British National Space Centre, the government department responsible for the British space programme.
There it was decided that there is a strong case to pursue a study to investigate the possible UK contribution to the developing international effort to evaluate the NEO threat. We also decided that a second meeting should be held at the headquarters of the BNSC, on 12th November 1996.
In advance of this meeting Dr Tom Gehrels and seventeen other well-known US scientists wrote to prominent British scientists and politicians urging their support for UK participation in international studies into the NEO threat. A week later another letter in a similar vein, from Dr Edward Teller, one of the most prominent physicists of the 20th century, was delivered to the Prime Ministers of Great Britain and Australia. The British reply, drafted by the Ministry of Defence, was addressed to “Mr Teller”! So much for research!
The meeting in London attracted considerable media interest (much to the discomfort of the BNSC!) The aim was to bring together as many interested parties as possible to assess exactly what the United Kingdom was doing in the field of NEO studies and planetary defence, and to discuss what should be done in the future.
Representatives of quite a few government, academic and independent organisations attended and again the unanimous conclusion was that something needed to be done. However, the main stumbling block throughout the proceedings was the apportionment of responsibility for the whole business. The fear was that because no government department or agency was willing to take the project under their wing the whole effort could flounder. The “not my problem guv” syndrome. It was crystal clear that there were a number of reasons for the apparent reluctance to do anything.
· What problem? This is a new issue. The evidence of cosmic impacts has been in plain view since the invention of the telescope, but the scale of planetary bombardment has only become clear since the advent of the space age. A number of events have occurred in the past few years, such as the discovery of the probable K-T "smoking gun" at Chicxulub and the collisions of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter, that have brought the subject to the world's attention. Past prejudice against catastrophist notions is lessening as the evidence builds up, and the reality of major impacts is no longer in doubt. Indeed, there is a considerably stronger consensus amongst the scientific community about the impact threat than other environmental problems that attract considerable funding – global warming and BSE are two prime examples.
· Historical Inertia. Ancient man was quite convinced that cosmic influences had a significant part to play in his way of life and continued well being. This conviction is clearly demonstrated in the stories and myths from around the world concerning conflict and disaster meted out from the skies, usually by omnipotent "gods". This catastrophist view of the cosmos reigned supreme until the Age of Reason when Newtonian principles turned the unknown and unpredictable universe into a benign, mechanical system and Darwinism spawned the concept of gradual evolution over extended periods of time. In the resulting predictable, gradualist cosmos there was no place for catastrophism or major, sudden changes in the global environment. Since the late 1980's the realisation that Darwinian evolution has almost certainly been punctuated by massive catastrophic events, causing major redirection in biological and geographic evolution has led to the breaking of many scientific paradigms.
· Nothing can be done about the problem, so why bother? Until the dawn of the space age mankind was truly helpless in the face of cosmic bombardment, so there was little to be gained from worrying about the problem. However, the advances in technology that have occurred during the past two decades or so have changed the situation radically. Surveillance technology now allows the detection and tracking of threat objects, while spacecraft technology has advanced sufficiently to allow the interception of such bodies. Much of this has been because of the United States' space programme. Measures to deflect threatening bodies have been developed, involving the use of nuclear weapons, but emerging technologies may provide more "environmentally friendly" alternatives. The problem can be dealt with now, albeit in a fairly crude fashion.
· It’ll cost too much. In 1994 the NASA sponsored NEO Detection Workshop, chaired by Dr. Eugene Shoemaker recommended the establishment of a global surveillance network consisting of six ground based telescopes linked to a data collection centre. The estimated cost amounted to $50 million to establish the system, and $10 per year to run. These costs are now regarded as being on the low side, but with advancing technology, not wildly unrealistic.
The establishment of the Spaceguard Survey will be expensive in layman’s terms, but the costs involved, to quote Sir Crispin Tickell in a recent letter to the Prime Minister, are “rounding-up figures”, in other words, almost insignificant at government level. The effects of even a small impact such as the Tunguska event over a populated area would devastate the local economy. With the increasing globalisation of the money markets such events could easily have global consequences.
Governments world-wide spend considerable sums of money on hazards that take less than an average of 150 lives per country per year. Consider the number of people killed annually in air crashes and the amounts spent on air safety. Large sums are spent annually on the study of other natural hazards that have consequences orders of magnitude less severe than even a small impact event.
· Self interest. The blame for inaction cannot be placed exclusively at the door of politicians. Within the scientific community there is still disagreement, some acrimonious, over the nature and extent of the threat. It is perfectly natural for scientists to disagree, indeed that is the nature of the scientific method. However, no one disputes at least the possibility of a significant threat, and, given the possible consequences, it is not justifiable to oppose programmes to assess that possibility; that would be playing dice with the survival of the human species. Many scientific bodies oppose research into the NEO threat because such programmes might divert funding from their particular fields. While this is perfectly understandable from a narrow perspective, it is an abrogation of the responsibility of science to safeguard humankind, or at least to alert it to threats to its well-being.
· It’s not my problem. The evidence for past catastrophic events, and the inevitability of a reoccurrence is incontrovertible, but exactly who should be responsible for doing anything about it? Planetary Defence is a multi-disciplinary undertaking. Astronomers have been at the forefront of the search for, and detection of NEOs, but planetary scientists, geologists, palaeontologists, biologists, physicists and many others have been deeply involved in piecing together the jigsaw that has resulted in our current state of knowledge. But is the problem strictly scientific? Scientists are concerned with the acquisition and interpretation of new data. To study asteroids and comets the researcher needs to study only a representative sample; there is no need to find them all. A planetary defence programme would have to do just that. The funding and resources required to detect and track all NEOs cannot therefore be justified on scientific research grounds. Defence is usually the prerogative of the military, but there is some resistance from the defence establishment to becoming involved in planetary defence. The normal reasons for inaction invoke the inability of a single nation to achieve very much, though this ignores the essentially international nature of planetary defence. The excuses hide the real reason - money. Defence budgets are stretched to the limit without having a new drain on already scarce resources. So, neither the scientific or military communities are willing to take responsibility for planetary defence. Governments will have to come to some decision sooner or later, preferably before the event.
A spin-off of the meeting was the establishment of Spaceguard UK, which was originally designed to be an information service for the public, media and the professional - nothing at all to do with political lobbying. In a surprisingly short time we had nearly all of the key individuals worldwide signed up as members.
A second UK Spaceguard meeting was held in Cambridge on 10 July 1997 organised by Jasper Wall, the then Director of the late lamented Royal Greenwich Observatory, and Mark Bailey, the director of the Armagh Observatory. The meeting was designed to review the current understanding of the extraterrestrial impact hazard, the level of the actuarial risk in comparison with other significant hazards, and the contribution that U.K astronomers might make towards a better understanding and assessment of the risk.
It was at this meeting that Dr Nigel Holloway presented a formal risk assessment, based on the parameters set by the Health & Safety Executive at the Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station public enquiry.
Julian Salt of the Loss Prevention Council also introduced the concept of actuarial cost – a method used by the insurance industry to calculate their premiums.
The meeting concluded with a presentation by Richard Tremayne-Smith from the BNSC during which he stated that any disagreements were all at the level of detail, and that there was a unanimous view that something needed to be done about the NEO threat. He went on to say that nothing said at the meeting would constitute an excuse for doing nothing.
As a result, nothing is precisely what happened! Subsequent correspondence with the BNSC and NERC was not encouraging. On 4 February 1998 the BNSC wrote:
“The Government's view is that the scale of action taken so far is commensurate with the known level of the threat.
We have seen the Council of Europe document "Action by the Council of Europe on the Detection of Asteroids and Comets Potentially Dangerous to Humankind" but do not feel that it adds anything new to the debate.”
But the Natural Environment Research Council took the biscuit by writing:
“This area is not covered by the NERC mission. The work which NERC supports on environmental risks and hazards focuses on extreme natural events including inland flooding, storm surges, seismic events, storm tracks, land instability, and the environmental consequences of the release of genetically modified organisms.”
It was also at about this time that I severely upset the powers that be by quoting some numbers on the British financial contribution to the global NEO effort.
The European Space Agency gave a grant to the Spaceguard Foundation to set up the Spaceguard Central Node. I divided the amount by the number of ESA members and deduced that the resulting figure (£ 5928.57p – about $ 8300) was the British contribution. I was swiftly informed, in no uncertain terms that this was totally inaccurate, and that I simply didn’t understand the way that these things were done. On further prompting the BNSC admitted that such grants were made on a national basis – in this case, Italy - and that the British contribution was actually zero.
On 12 October 1997 a proposal, co-authored by Mark Bailey, Alan Fitzsimmons, Duncan Steel, Jasper Wall and me, was submitted to PPARC. We proposed the installation of a CCD mosaic on the UKST to be used primarily for Near-Earth Object, asteroid, comet and Edgeworth-Kuiper belt research. In addition to this primary role the telescope would obviously be suitable for many other astronomical applications. We felt that the construction of a large CCD mosaic on the UKST would maintain a significant UK resource in the southern hemisphere and would also provide a world-beating instrument for the UK planetary science community. The proposal met with lukewarm interest, and no funding.
Then on 12 March 1998 the mistaken announcement that an asteroid called 1997 XF11 could hit the Earth in 2028 hit the press like a run-away train.
The fact that the claim was retracted within 24 hours did little to calm the public fears, but still nothing happened at government level. Indeed, throughout the whole affair there was not a single statement or comment from any government department or agency to clarify the situation for the public and media. Although the whole thing caused no end of trouble amongst astronomers, the public began to wake up to the possibility that massive collisions could happen.
In 25 Sep 1998 I lectured to the Shrewsbury Astronomical Society.
In the audience was a local Member of Parliament, Lembit Öpik, the grandson of Ernst Öpik, who seemed interested in the subject. We spent far too long in the pub afterwards, and during the proceedings he promised to take up the matter in the House. I felt that this was unlikely to happen (in fact is was a “Yeah right” sort of response), but I was completely wrong.
On 3 March 99 in the House of Commons Lembit rose to address the House. He began: “I have a big problem with asteroids.” He then spent the next twenty minutes describing the threat posed by Near Earth Objects, and suggesting that we need to do something about it. John Battle, the science minister, stated, "As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, dangers exist and threats come from things that are prosaically known as near-Earth objects. Part of my job as a Minister is to steer a course between the panic of the immediate moment and deep complacency. Somewhere between those two parameters, we should take the matter seriously. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is reassured that the matter will be treated seriously.”
This was the first inkling that the government might be changing its mind. Then on 10 May 99 there was a meeting of the All Party Astronomy and Space Environment Group at House of Lords where NEOs were the topic, and on 15th June in the House of Lords, Lord Tanlaw asked Her Majesty's Government: "What steps are being taken to form a national Spaceguard centre, as part of a European Spaceguard programme, to improve the assessment and probability factor of the impact hazard of a near earth object on the continent of Europe or in the seas surrounding it?" In reply the Under-Secretary of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Sainsbury) stated that the government takes the potential threat of impact by near earth objects very seriously, but that they regard it as an issue where an international approach is essential. He went on to say that the Government had no plans to set up a national Spaceguard agency.
Lord Tanlaw questioned the minister about asteroid 1999 AN10, which has a small collision probability, and the minister stated the hope that the "Spaceguard website" will convey any information to the public. There was no official "Spaceguard website", especially in the UK – the only one at the time was the unfunded and privately run Spaceguard UK website, and it is flattering, but scary to think that a government would wish news of an impending asteroid impact to be issued to the public by me!
On July 8th 1999 a team from Spaceguard UK visited the minister at the Department of Trade and Industry to put the case for a feasibility study into the establishment of a National Spaceguard Centre. The upshot of the meeting was that the minister agreed to establish a Task Force and this was officially announced on 4th January 2000.
On 18 September of the same year, after nine months of hard work, the Task Force published their report.
Not only did it validate the hazard posed by NEOs, but it also made 14 substantive recommendations for action by the government.
The report was received with tremendous enthusiasm worldwide, and was generally seen as an excellent account of the NEO hazard and steps that should be taken to reduce it. Some even saw it as the trigger for global participation in a robust and well-funded NEO research programme.
However, things rarely move fast in government circles (unless it’s a hot media item at the time) and we had to wait until the end of February 2001 for a response from government - it was surprisingly positive. The minister accepted all of the recommendations, and set in train a number of studies to see how best they could be implemented. However, there was no firm commitment to action, just an undertaking to talk some more about it.
In the meantime, Spaceguard UK established the Spaceguard Centre at the former Powys Observatory in mid-Wales. Opened by Sir Patrick Moore on 29 September.
Our aim has been to develop and maintain a place where we can bring astronomy and Earth science to the public with a specific emphasis on the Spaceguard project, and to act as a link between researchers and the rest of us.
In August 2001 the Rome based Spaceguard Foundation selected The Spaceguard Centre to become the central point of contact between the public, press and media and those involved with the NEO hazard worldwide as the International Spaceguard Information Centre.
While we were in the process of setting up the centre, the BNSC published a statement of work for a National NEO Information Centre. As this is precisely the job that the Spaceguard Centre is designed to do, we submitted a bid, in collaboration with Regional Centres at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, the Glasgow Science Centre in Scotland, the Liverpool John Moores University in northern England and the Herstmonceux Science Centre in southern England. Other institutions committed themselves to becoming Regional Centres once the initial consortium had been established. But our bid failed for a number of reasons, mainly I suspect that we probably couldn’t be relied upon to toe the government’s line. Actually there is a “gag” clause in the statement of work that states: “The contractor will accept some limitations on its freedom to promote views on UK space policy, and particularly on the hazard presented by NEOs, in particular if these should be in direct contradiction of those of the Government.” I quite agree with the BNSC that we would have found this difficult! However, having been campaigning for action for six years it was very pleasing to see the rush of individuals and institutions that were suddenly passionately interested in NEOs! My only question to them is, where were you when the hard work was being done?
Recent events have shown that the media and news agencies often fail to provide accurate information, but over the past six years Spaceguard UK has been developing close relationships with the printed and broadcast media. Many of our members are regular contributors to national and local newspapers, professional and popular journals, radio and television.
So on 28 December 2001 we also announced the establishment of the CAIN (Comet and Asteroid Information Network), an independent nationwide network of Regional Spaceguard Information Centres covering England (north and south), Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Regional Centres act as information nodes for media and public enquiries and some will host physical exhibitions. Our baptism of fire over the YB5 affair in January proved the system, and the value of local centres that can serve the public and media. Further centres will be introduced as the project progresses and hopefully CAIN will expand to include other national Spaceguard organisations around the world.
In 1996 the whole subject of Near Earth Objects was down there with the flying saucers and little green men. Since then the British government has been persuaded that there is a clear and present hazard to the UK from NEOs, and finally the penny has dropped. Things are on the move, and it is good to see the sudden increase in interest in the professional astronomical community since the publication of the Task Force report. But, for all of the hype from the DTI, we still only have words. No one has cut metal yet, and there has been no concrete action. So far the only firm commitment is to provide a shop window, albeit a fairly classy one. The real measure of commitment will be what is on the shelves behind the display, and so far there is nothing firm in the offing despite the fact that to implement all 14 recommendations would cost about the same as one Tornado jet.
I am reminded of Sir Humphrey Appleby, as senior civil servant in the TV satire “Yes Minister” who counselled his junior that “The less you intend to do about something, the more you talk about it.” So the campaign to hold the government’s feet to the fire will go on.
One of the things that I am very keen to promote is an amateur network of observers in the UK. Our main thrust at this stage is to put together a package of information and software that will allow anyone with a reasonable telescope and camera combination to start doing some useful work, probably on main belt asteroids to start with. The hope is that, once bitten by the bug, some will then want to progress to NEO work. I am currently working with the likes of Duncan Steel, Mark Bailey and Alan Fitzsimmons on possible NEO projects for the Faulkes and Liverpool telescopes, and I see a direct read-over to amateur observers. The British Astronomical Association, the BAA, is already engaged, and we will be working on this one in partnership. Of course, I am open to any advice or help on this, especially from such an august body as this!
I think, that with the amazingly generous help and forbearance of many around the world, and to the considerable annoyance of a few, the Spaceguard UK campaign is beginning to bear fruit.
