No, the suggestion is absurd once you have a bit of background understanding about how detection of potentially hazardous NEOs works. Searching for asteroids is a global program. We have the Sentinel program to find them nowadays (they used to be found frequently by amateurs but not so much now). But finding them is only a tiny part of the problem.
Once you've found the asteroid you have to work out its trajectory. And it would be crazy to use the Hubble space telescope or any of the assets that are (partly) under the control of NASA for the follow up observations.
They aren't even used to find the asteroids. For that you need a large field of view - not Hubble's forte. It's field of view is measured in arc seconds usually and largest field of view 0.05 degrees or about a tenth of the diameter of the Moon. By comparision PAN-STARRS which is one of the main telescopes used for searching for NEOs has a field of view of 3 degrees, or six times the diameter of the Moon.
You can compare the field of view of various telescopes here: Pan-STARRS
And this is a photograph taken with Pan-STARRS
- full three degrees view, 60 times the diameter, and 3600 times the area of the field of view of Hubble and photographed with a super high resolution a 1.4 gigapixel digital camera. This is what you want for searching for asteroids - wide field of view, lots of photographs, sensitive to low light levels.
To see this image in its full glory go to APOD: 2012 October 12 and then click through to see it full screen. And that's just a fraction of the detail of its original images, which it takes twice a minute, each in enough detail so that if printed at 300 dpi it would cover half a basketball court The 1.4-Gigapixel Camera Standing Between Us and Armageddon
Pan-STARRS is operated by Hawaii University and a team of astronomers from 10 different institutes from four countries in the PS1 Science Consortium
And when you first find the asteroid, you have no idea what its long term trajectory is. You need several weeks of observations to get started, and then they continue to refine the orbits over years of observations.
You need all the help you can get for that task.
Big telescopes are sometimes used when asteroids do flybys of the Earth to get detailed images of them. But apart from that - it's lots of observations by many people including many amateur observations.
The main ones are listed here:
"Most of the NEO Discovery Surveys, including the Catalina Sky survey, Pan-STARRS and Spacewatch provide a substantial number of follow-up observations. Dr. David Tholen, at the University of Hawaii, is particularly efficient in providing the very faint follow-up observations that are often required to prevent small NEOs from being lost.
A substantial number of faint follow-up observations are also made at the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico (Bill and Eileen Ryan). Explicit mention should also be made of the prolific number of follow-up observations provided by the Astronomical Research Institute (ARI) under the direction of Robert Holmes and the amateur group at the New Millennium Observatory in Northern Italy."
The new millenium observatory in Italy - run by amateur astronomers - one of the many groups of observers who are involved in the Follow-up Observing Programs to refine the orbits of NEOs. This was built by Luca Cozzi, an engineer, brother of Dr. Elia Cozzi, Italian amateur astronomer and astrophysicist whose idea it was.
That's just to give an example - there are many groups of people and many telescopes world wide involved in this - and as you see - that's an ordinary not that big suburban house in Italy with a telescope built into its roof - the telescopes don't have to be huge monster tens of meters telescopes for this job.
Robert Holmes, amateur astronomer, one of the most prolific follow up observers for the NEO program.
For an idea of some of the other amateur groups involved in the NEO follow up observations see the Planetary Society grants, which they give regularly - to amateur groups who are doing especially good work in this area. See:
Leaders in Asteroid Tracking/Observing Awarded Through Global Grant Program
Bob Holmes again, this time with one of his telescopes - a wide field of view 0.76 m (30 in) telescope with a sensitive CCD camera purchased with a 2013 grant from the Planetary Society. Bob Holmes of the Astronomical Research Institute in Illinois, USA
So, NASA are part of a big global program, and it is all interconnected.
- The sensitive telescopes with a wide field of view that find the asteroids originally (this used to involve amateurs also but is now largely automated) - run by many teams of astronomers from many different countries
- Those telescopes together with amateurs that track them after that to get the long baseline of measurements for the accuracy you need to assess probabilities properly.
- The big telescopes that occasionally take images of them for instance during close flybys of Earth.
- The computing / math geeks who are expert at working out the orbits and dynamics. They all have to work together, it's a big international effort.
- And many others
Current Impact Risks
It's easy to check. Just look and see what colour they are.
If there is one that is a significant risk it will be coloured orange or red in the Current Impact Risks table.
And note - that when asteroids are first discovered, then because the orbit is not well known, they may have a tiny chance of hitting Earth - which soon goes away as they find out more about the orbit. The dramatic headlines you sometimes see are usually published just a few days or a week or so after the asteroid is found, when nobody is quite sure what its trajectory is exactly because we just haven't got enough observations yet (because the detais of the orbits can be very sensitive to small changes in the trajectory especially if they do close flybys of Earth).
So far (as of writing this) only one asteroid has got as far as yellow, briefly - it got right up to Torino scale 4 for a month or so, but it was soon reclassified to green, and then to white. No asteroid has yet reached orange or red. And note if any asteroid did reach orange or red, the chances are very high that as the orbit is refined, that it would be reclassified to white. But still, it would at that point be a matter of public concern and everyone would know about it because you would just need to go to that web page to see all the details of it as known so far.
See also
Robert Walker's answer to What are the chances of Asteroid 2012 TT5 hitting the Earth on September 24, 2015?
and the quora topic: Asteroid Scares
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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