NASA Has the Technology to Save Us From an Asteroid Strike, But Congress Won’t Fund It
At the biannual Planetary Defense Conference earlier this year, NASA ran a simulation of an asteroid slamming into the center of Manhattan.
For several millennia now, we've been lucky, but our luck won't hold out forever.
The gathering of astronomers, planetary scientists, and FEMA disaster-response experts attempted a number of interventions that might be possible within a time window of eight years, the given warning period before impact.
Catastrophic asteroid crashes are not without precedent, and scientists say it's only a matter of time before another one occurs—that is, if we do nothing to prevent it. It's believed that a huge asteroid crash off the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula created a worldwide disaster that helped to speed the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
In 1908, a meteoroid less than 300 feet in diameter exploded in the air over the Tunguska region of Siberia, creating a shockwave that leveled trees for hundreds of square miles. It's a matter of sheer luck it didn't hit a major population center, where human casualties could have been enormous.
For several millennia now, we've been lucky, but our luck won't hold out forever. There are millions of asteroids circulating about in our solar system, some of them hundreds of miles across, and although the odds of a massive one crashing to Earth in the near future is statistically low, the devastation could be apocalyptic.
Back at the conference, the experts tried sending several spacecrafts to knock the asteroid off-course by slamming into it. They considered blasting it with nuclear weapons. They even considered painting it white so it absorbed less of the sun's energy, hoping that would shift the asteroid's trajectory. In the simulations, all of the interventions failed and the giant space rock crashed into Manhattan, killing 1.3 million people in a massive explosion that was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
NEOCam is designed, tested, and ready to build, but the project is currently frozen because of a $40 million gap in NASA funding.
Given more time, the scientists said, they might have succeeded in preventing the disaster. However, with today's asteroid-hunting telescopes, it's not likely we would have more warning. Our current telescopes are not powerful enough to detect all the near-earth asteroids, nor are they positioned well enough for sufficient detection. As recently as last week, for example, an asteroid traveling 15 miles a second narrowly missed crashing into the Earth, and it was only noticed several days in advance.
Now for the good news: There is a new technology that could buy us the time we need, says MIT planetary sciences professor Richard P. Binzel and colleagues who attended the conference. The Near-Earth Object Camera, or NEOCam, designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, would detect more than 90 percent of nearby objects that are 420 feet across or larger, according to Binzel.
The powerful infrared telescope is designed to sit within the L1 Lagrange point, a stable location in space where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the sun cancel each other out. From there, large space bodies could be detected early enough to give scientists decades of warning when an asteroid is heading for Earth. NEOCam is designed, tested, and ready to build, but the project is currently frozen because of a $40 million gap in NASA funding.
The status of NEOCam, according to Binzel, is a case-study in short-sightedness and a lack of leadership. Congress needs to raise NASA's Planetary Defense budget from its current $160 million to $200 million to get the telescope built and launched into space, a goal that would seem eminently doable within the strictures of 2020's $4.75 trillion government budget. But Binzel describes a current deadlock between NASA, Congress, and the Office of Management and Budget as a "cosmic game of chicken."
If we don't use our technology to defend the planet, "it would be the most epic failure in the history of science."
In an excruciatingly budget-conscious atmosphere, "No one wants to stick their neck out and take adult responsibility" for getting the funding allocated that would unfreeze the project, says Binzel. But, he adds, "We have a moral obligation to act."
NEOCam would not only spot the overwhelming majority of asteroids in Earth's vicinity, it would determine their size and pinpoint exactly where they are likely to strike the Earth. And it would allow us decades to act, according to Binzel. Repeated ramming by an international armada of specialized spacecraft could slightly change the trajectory of an asteroid, he says. Changing the trajectory only a tiny bit, given the scale of millions of miles and several decades for the course change to take effect, could cause an asteroid to miss the Earth altogether.
"So far we've been relying on luck," says Binzel, "but luck is not a plan." Now that we have the technology to discover what's careening through our space neighborhood, it's our ethical duty to deploy it. If we don't use our technology to gain the knowledge we need to defend the planet, Binzel concludes, "it would be the most epic failure in the history of science."
Should Congress green light the $40 million budget for the new asteroid-hunting telescope? @NASA #NASA #astroid— leapsmag (@leapsmag) 1564681293.0
When a patient is diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, having surgery to remove the tumor is considered the standard of care. But what happens when a patient can’t have surgery?
Whether it’s due to high blood pressure, advanced age, heart issues, or other reasons, some breast cancer patients don’t qualify for a lumpectomy—one of the most common treatment options for early-stage breast cancer. A lumpectomy surgically removes the tumor while keeping the patient’s breast intact, while a mastectomy removes the entire breast and nearby lymph nodes.
Fortunately, a new technique called cryoablation is now available for breast cancer patients who either aren’t candidates for surgery or don’t feel comfortable undergoing a surgical procedure. With cryoablation, doctors use an ultrasound or CT scan to locate any tumors inside the patient’s breast. They then insert small, needle-like probes into the patient's breast which create an “ice ball” that surrounds the tumor and kills the cancer cells.
Cryoablation has been used for decades to treat cancers of the kidneys and liver—but only in the past few years have doctors been able to use the procedure to treat breast cancer patients. And while clinical trials have shown that cryoablation works for tumors smaller than 1.5 centimeters, a recent clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York has shown that it can work for larger tumors, too.
In this study, doctors performed cryoablation on patients whose tumors were, on average, 2.5 centimeters. The cryoablation procedure lasted for about 30 minutes, and patients were able to go home on the same day following treatment. Doctors then followed up with the patients after 16 months. In the follow-up, doctors found the recurrence rate for tumors after using cryoablation was only 10 percent.
For patients who don’t qualify for surgery, radiation and hormonal therapy is typically used to treat tumors. However, said Yolanda Brice, M.D., an interventional radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, “when treated with only radiation and hormonal therapy, the tumors will eventually return.” Cryotherapy, Brice said, could be a more effective way to treat cancer for patients who can’t have surgery.
“The fact that we only saw a 10 percent recurrence rate in our study is incredibly promising,” she said.
Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.
But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.
Clinicians from the Royal Berkshire Hospital presented the results of a long-term, nine-year clinical trial where 89 men and women who suffered from recurrent UTIs were given an oral vaccine called MV140, designed to prevent the infections. Every day for three months, the participants were given two sprays of the vaccine (flavored to taste like pineapple) and then followed over the course of nine years. Clinicians analyzed medical records and asked the study participants about symptoms to check whether any experienced UTIs or had any adverse reactions from taking the vaccine.
The results showed that across nine years, 48 of the participants (about 54%) remained completely infection-free. On average, the study participants remained infection free for 54.7 months—four and a half years.
“While we need to be pragmatic, this vaccine is a potential breakthrough in preventing UTIs and could offer a safe and effective alternative to conventional treatments,” said Gernot Bonita, Professor of Urology at the Alta Bro Medical Centre for Urology in Switzerland, who is also the EAU Chairman of Guidelines on Urological Infections.
The news comes as a relief not only for people who suffer chronic UTIs, but also to doctors who have seen an uptick in antibiotic-resistant UTIs in the past several years. Because UTIs usually require antibiotics, patients run the risk of developing a resistance to the antibiotics, making infections more difficult to treat. A preventative vaccine could mean less infections, less antibiotics, and less drug resistance overall.
“Many of our participants told us that having the vaccine restored their quality of life,” said Dr. Bob Yang, Consultant Urologist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, who helped lead the research. “While we’re yet to look at the effect of this vaccine in different patient groups, this follow-up data suggests it could be a game-changer for UTI prevention if it’s offered widely, reducing the need for antibiotic treatments.”