9 ms·

A huge fireball exploded in Earth's atmosphere in December, according to Nasa

214 points by okket 8y ago

kahirsch 8y ago
Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at Nasa, told BBC News a fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years. Best title ever.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  Oh hell yes.
- tudelo 8y ago
  Can't compete with that guys job title at the class reunion.
  - Tepix 8y ago
    Well, there's also a "planetary protection officer", Lisa Pratt (and deputy planetary protection officer Elaine Seasly) :-)
    - cyberfart 8y ago
      There was also this 9 years old kid who applied for planetary protection officer position :) https://www.businessinsider.de/child-applies-nasa-planetary-protection-officer-job-opening-2017-8 https://www.businessinsider.de/child-applies-nasa-planetary-...
- sshagent 8y ago
  That was my take from the article too. Hell of a job title
Datenstrom 8y ago
While I was working at NASA I was told by a colleague that Trump canceled the asteroid deflection program that was being ran at the LaRC facility. Now looking for a reference all I can find is news about him starting an asteroid deflection program because of this incident. I'm not sure of the details since I was working in an AI research department.
- pohl 8y ago
  Here you go. That was news from a budget proposal on March 16, 2017 https://www.space.com/36090-trump-2018-nasa-budget-request.html https://www.space.com/36090-trump-2018-nasa-budget-request.h...
- jtuente 8y ago
  I mean, that's not how the US budget works. But yes, his budget proposal included nixing an Obama-era project to redirect an asteroid to lunar space for a manned mission. I wouldn't call that a deflection program.
  - Rebelgecko 8y ago
    I'd say deflecting an asteroid so that it goes closer to Earth still counts as deflecting :) That said, the cancellation was a shame since it gave the Lunar Gateway a concrete and useful purpose.
ppeetteerr 8y ago
Well this is terrifying. Time to call in the Space Force!
- stunt 8y ago
  To justify the costs of Space Force, First, we need to find space terrorists. Or, find aliens and sell weapons to them.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    There's oil on Titan! (No, really, there is!)
  - dontbenebby 8y ago
    Do any of these asteroids have oil?
okket 8y ago
Also: "Imagine what might have happened if this meteor had exploded not over the Bering Sea but over nuclear-armed North Korea, India, or Pakistan during a time of increased tensions or actual conflict." https://twitter.com/AtomicAnalyst/status/1107660418967916545 https://twitter.com/AtomicAnalyst/status/1107660418967916545
- qwerty9876 8y ago
  A similar situation happened in 2002 during a time of Indian-Pakistani tensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Eastern_Mediterranean_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Eastern_Mediterranean_eve...
- r721 8y ago
  Chelyabinsk meteor exploded almost over a city: "The first explosion was the most powerful, and was preceded by a bright flash, which lasted about five seconds. Initial newspaper altitude estimates ranged from 30–70 km, with an explosive equivalent, according to NASA, of roughly 500 kilotonnes of TNT (2,100 TJ), although there is some debate on this yield (500 kt is exactly the same energy released by the Ivy King nuclear explosion in 1952). According to a paper in 2013, all these ~500 kiloton yield estimates for the meteor airburst are "uncertain by a factor of two because of a lack of calibration data at those high energies and altitudes." The hypocentre of the explosion was to the south of Chelyabinsk, in Yemanzhelinsk and Yuzhnouralsk. Due to the height of the air burst, the atmosphere absorbed most of the explosion's energy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
christophilus 8y ago
> The space rock exploded with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb Well, that's fun.
- mrguyorama 8y ago
  Kinetic energy is a hell of a thing. That squared term really adds up quick
  - sidcool 8y ago
    Yeah. It's O(n^2). Should optimize.
  - folex 8y ago
    Can you elaborate plz?
    - rtkwe 8y ago
      The energy of an object is (1/2)mv^2. Doubling velocity quadruples the kinetic energy.
    - knicholes 8y ago
      Kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2
- realreality 8y ago
  How many Library of Congresses is that?
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  10x Hiroshima is still solidly sub-megaton. We dropped a lot of megaton bombs on the middle of nowhere before atmospheric testing was banned.
golemotron 8y ago
> Measuring several metres in size, the space rock exploded 25.6km above the Earth's surface, with an impact energy of 173 kilotons. What causes a meteor to explode 25km above the earth? Thermal expansion of internal gas?
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
  It's called an explosion, but it's more of a conversion of kinetic energy to heat due to friction against the air. As the rock heats up, it starts to fall apart, and then smaller pieces go through that as well. Here's a neat simulation of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbh6GjRChnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbh6GjRChnQ
  - iamgopal 8y ago
    Isn't it more about air compression instead of friction ?
    - EForEndeavour 8y ago
      Correct. Further reading: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-a-spacecraft-heat-up-during-reentry https://www.quora.com/Why-does-a-spacecraft-heat-up-during-r...
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  Mainly aerodynamic forces. The heating event is so quick there's not time for the interior of a sizable meteor to warm up. Meteors' thermal conductivity and diffusivity are generally pretty low. Even at 25km altitude, aerodynamic forces are very high and nonuniform with shock wave impingements. These forces will shatter a rocky meteor quite suddenly.
mttyng 8y ago
Assuming we (Earth) get some reasonable warning time for a problematic impact, the logistics of alerting -and then moving- a large metropolitan area like NYC, for example, are interesting. Where do we place these people? What about the city's infrastructure? Do we just stand by, brace for impact and hope for the best? Or is there something more we could do to mitigate the disaster? I know a lot of that depends on the amount of time beforehand, but I find the problem intriguing.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  see how evacuations before large hurricanes or other predictable disasters are going. It's problematic at best.
  - avar 8y ago
    Those don't serve as good examples since e.g. for hurricanes by the time the evacuation order is given the weather itself is causing issues for the evacuation. It would still be a logistical nightmare, but other things being equal should proceed in a more orderly fashion than a hurricane evacuation, especially since the exact time of impact would be known in advance.
    - Xylakant 8y ago
      They do serve as a good indicator. The primary problems that occur during evacuations are "people don't believe it will hit them" and "there's no way to move all those people." I'd also doubt that our math is good enough to precisely calculate the impact point of a meteorite more than few days in advance. Hit/no-hit probably, and which region, yes, but off by 50km? Meteorites break up on atmospheric impact, getting the precise point right is probably impossible.
- jwm20 8y ago
  You may be interested in a recent episode of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/atomic-tattoos/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/atomic-tattoos/). The title of the podcast comes from a Cold War program carried out in 1952 in which students could opt to receive a small tattoo of their blood type, with the goal of creating a "walking blood bank" in the event of a disaster requiring mass transfusions. Related to your question, the episode also explores the history of "duck and cover." It turns out it's there is some credibility to the technique. In September 1945, the US sent a team called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission to Japan to research and interview survivors of nuclear blasts. They located survivors just a few blocks from the explosion epicenter, who had been sheltered by concrete basements. They also heard stories of people who were killed just by shattering windows and falling debris. With just some ability to shelter, survivability might be higher than you suspect.
donretag 8y ago
Why does the BBC not use the NASA acronym?
- airstrike 8y ago
  Certain languages (British English and Portuguese, to name the two I know) dictate that if you pronounce the acronym as if it were a word, you only capitalize the first letter. Nasa and Nato, but NSA and WTO.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    And in the US, non-proper nouns are often all lowercase even if they were originally acronyms. e.g. radar, laser, sonar, etc. And, even for proper nouns, things like programming languages often just has an initial cap although all caps is typically the technically correct form in US English.
  - dyoo1979 8y ago
    Example reference: see the "abbreviations and acronyms" section in: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a Hilariously enough, "Nasa" is specifically called out as an negative example from the English Wikipedia style guidelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#Acronyms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Capi...
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Doesn't the BBC still believe in a country called "Burma"?
Wildgoose 8y ago
It's possible that in 1178 an asteroid hit the Moon with a 120,000 megaton blast - an Extinction Event if it had hit the Earth. (By way of comparison, the Hiroshima Bomb was 15 kilotons). Recorded by monks at Canterbury at the time, and only a possibility - but something to consider. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_(crater) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_(crater)
- nkrisc 8y ago
  According to the same page, more recent developments don't support the theory: > High-resolution images obtained by the Japanese satellite SELENE in 2008 were used to date the crater by counting the smaller craters within it and its ejecta deposits. This gave an age of 4(+6, −3) million years, much too old for the hypothesis.[2] > This raises the question of what the monks saw. An alternative theory holds that the monks just happened to be in the right place at the right time to see an exploding meteor coming at them and aligned with the Moon. This would explain why the monks were the only people known to have witnessed the event; such an alignment would only be observable from a specific spot on the Earth's surface.[8]
  - hinkley 8y ago
    What the monks reported sounds like it might be consistent with the optical disturbances caused by superheated air: > From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon which was below writhed, as it were in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the Moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then, after these transformations, the Moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance. An air burst between observer and observed would move around on the wind, causing ripples to come and go.
    - nkrisc 8y ago
JoeDaDude 8y ago
This one was detected by satellite, but scientists have been using acoustic detection of meteorite explosions for some time. Fittingly, they used detectors made for nuclear explosions, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization's infrasound network [1]. I learned this from reading this highly recommended book on the subject: Asteroids: Relics of Ancient Time by Michael K. Shepard [2] (amazon link) [1] https://www.norsar.no/r-d/safe-society/nuclear-test-ban-monitoring/infrasound-monitoring/ https://www.norsar.no/r-d/safe-society/nuclear-test-ban-moni... [2] https://www.amazon.com/reader/110706144X?_encoding=UTF8&query=kiloton#reader_110706144X https://www.amazon.com/reader/110706144X?_encoding=UTF8&quer...
- XzetaU8 8y ago
  Vela Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident
vectorEQ 8y ago
"That's another thing we have in our defence, there's plenty of water on the planet." so that's what planetary defence people do :D since it's unrealistic to prepare to defend the planet actually, let's just point at things :D and call them out for being in our defence! :D we have mountains too! they are also in our defence!
cubano 8y ago
I mean, with all the money the US currently spends on military budgets, I can't for the life of me figure out why it is so hard to find the 50-100mil or so (estimated) it would cost for a few orbital IR telescopes and just deal with this problem once and for all. A Pegasus XL rocket can lift 976 pounds (443 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit for about $13.5 million...put two "budget" telescopes on one launch and get to work.
- viach 8y ago
  It is expected to happen only about 3 times in a century (from article). In other words, building this system of telescopes won't affect the next elections in any positive way.
  - dfgert 8y ago
    NASA actually receive lots of funding(might be second after military). Most of their work doesn't align with any of the politics promises, even then they receive good chunk of budget spending.
    - viach 8y ago
      In the end, it's always about politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Political_opposition_to_NASA_funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Political_oppos...
      - joejerryronnie 8y ago
        Isn’t everything?
    - mturmon 8y ago
      NASA 2018 budget is $20.7B. It is not in any way "second after military". NIH 2018 budget is $37B, NSF is $7.8B. DOD budget just for R&D and test/evaluation is $88B.
      - 8y ago
kosei 8y ago
Womp womp, article didn't get picked up when I posted it last night. Guess I should have retitled / waited until morning! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418939
kempbellt 8y ago
The gods are angry

214 points by okket 8y ago

Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at Nasa, told BBC News a fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years. Best title ever.

52-6F-62 8y ago
Oh hell yes.
tudelo 8y ago
Can't compete with that guys job title at the class reunion.
- Tepix 8y ago
  Well, there's also a "planetary protection officer", Lisa Pratt (and deputy planetary protection officer Elaine Seasly) :-)
  - cyberfart 8y ago
    There was also this 9 years old kid who applied for planetary protection officer position :) https://www.businessinsider.de/child-applies-nasa-planetary-protection-officer-job-opening-2017-8 https://www.businessinsider.de/child-applies-nasa-planetary-...
sshagent 8y ago
That was my take from the article too. Hell of a job title

Datenstrom 8y ago

While I was working at NASA I was told by a colleague that Trump canceled the asteroid deflection program that was being ran at the LaRC facility. Now looking for a reference all I can find is news about him starting an asteroid deflection program because of this incident. I'm not sure of the details since I was working in an AI research department.

pohl 8y ago
Here you go. That was news from a budget proposal on March 16, 2017 https://www.space.com/36090-trump-2018-nasa-budget-request.html https://www.space.com/36090-trump-2018-nasa-budget-request.h...
jtuente 8y ago
I mean, that's not how the US budget works. But yes, his budget proposal included nixing an Obama-era project to redirect an asteroid to lunar space for a manned mission. I wouldn't call that a deflection program.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  I'd say deflecting an asteroid so that it goes closer to Earth still counts as deflecting :) That said, the cancellation was a shame since it gave the Lunar Gateway a concrete and useful purpose.

ppeetteerr 8y ago

Well this is terrifying. Time to call in the Space Force!

stunt 8y ago
To justify the costs of Space Force, First, we need to find space terrorists. Or, find aliens and sell weapons to them.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  There's oil on Titan! (No, really, there is!)
- dontbenebby 8y ago
  Do any of these asteroids have oil?

okket 8y ago

Also: "Imagine what might have happened if this meteor had exploded not over the Bering Sea but over nuclear-armed North Korea, India, or Pakistan during a time of increased tensions or actual conflict." https://twitter.com/AtomicAnalyst/status/1107660418967916545 https://twitter.com/AtomicAnalyst/status/1107660418967916545

qwerty9876 8y ago
A similar situation happened in 2002 during a time of Indian-Pakistani tensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Eastern_Mediterranean_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Eastern_Mediterranean_eve...
r721 8y ago
Chelyabinsk meteor exploded almost over a city: "The first explosion was the most powerful, and was preceded by a bright flash, which lasted about five seconds. Initial newspaper altitude estimates ranged from 30–70 km, with an explosive equivalent, according to NASA, of roughly 500 kilotonnes of TNT (2,100 TJ), although there is some debate on this yield (500 kt is exactly the same energy released by the Ivy King nuclear explosion in 1952). According to a paper in 2013, all these ~500 kiloton yield estimates for the meteor airburst are "uncertain by a factor of two because of a lack of calibration data at those high energies and altitudes." The hypocentre of the explosion was to the south of Chelyabinsk, in Yemanzhelinsk and Yuzhnouralsk. Due to the height of the air burst, the atmosphere absorbed most of the explosion's energy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

christophilus 8y ago

> The space rock exploded with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb Well, that's fun.

mrguyorama 8y ago
Kinetic energy is a hell of a thing. That squared term really adds up quick
- sidcool 8y ago
  Yeah. It's O(n^2). Should optimize.
- folex 8y ago
  Can you elaborate plz?
  - rtkwe 8y ago
    The energy of an object is (1/2)mv^2. Doubling velocity quadruples the kinetic energy.
  - knicholes 8y ago
    Kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2
realreality 8y ago
How many Library of Congresses is that?
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
10x Hiroshima is still solidly sub-megaton. We dropped a lot of megaton bombs on the middle of nowhere before atmospheric testing was banned.

golemotron 8y ago

> Measuring several metres in size, the space rock exploded 25.6km above the Earth's surface, with an impact energy of 173 kilotons. What causes a meteor to explode 25km above the earth? Thermal expansion of internal gas?

bufferoverflow 8y ago
It's called an explosion, but it's more of a conversion of kinetic energy to heat due to friction against the air. As the rock heats up, it starts to fall apart, and then smaller pieces go through that as well. Here's a neat simulation of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbh6GjRChnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbh6GjRChnQ
- iamgopal 8y ago
  Isn't it more about air compression instead of friction ?
  - EForEndeavour 8y ago
    Correct. Further reading: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-a-spacecraft-heat-up-during-reentry https://www.quora.com/Why-does-a-spacecraft-heat-up-during-r...
ridgeguy 8y ago
Mainly aerodynamic forces. The heating event is so quick there's not time for the interior of a sizable meteor to warm up. Meteors' thermal conductivity and diffusivity are generally pretty low. Even at 25km altitude, aerodynamic forces are very high and nonuniform with shock wave impingements. These forces will shatter a rocky meteor quite suddenly.

mttyng 8y ago

Assuming we (Earth) get some reasonable warning time for a problematic impact, the logistics of alerting -and then moving- a large metropolitan area like NYC, for example, are interesting. Where do we place these people? What about the city's infrastructure? Do we just stand by, brace for impact and hope for the best? Or is there something more we could do to mitigate the disaster? I know a lot of that depends on the amount of time beforehand, but I find the problem intriguing.

Xylakant 8y ago
see how evacuations before large hurricanes or other predictable disasters are going. It's problematic at best.
- avar 8y ago
  Those don't serve as good examples since e.g. for hurricanes by the time the evacuation order is given the weather itself is causing issues for the evacuation. It would still be a logistical nightmare, but other things being equal should proceed in a more orderly fashion than a hurricane evacuation, especially since the exact time of impact would be known in advance.
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    They do serve as a good indicator. The primary problems that occur during evacuations are "people don't believe it will hit them" and "there's no way to move all those people." I'd also doubt that our math is good enough to precisely calculate the impact point of a meteorite more than few days in advance. Hit/no-hit probably, and which region, yes, but off by 50km? Meteorites break up on atmospheric impact, getting the precise point right is probably impossible.
jwm20 8y ago
You may be interested in a recent episode of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/atomic-tattoos/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/atomic-tattoos/). The title of the podcast comes from a Cold War program carried out in 1952 in which students could opt to receive a small tattoo of their blood type, with the goal of creating a "walking blood bank" in the event of a disaster requiring mass transfusions. Related to your question, the episode also explores the history of "duck and cover." It turns out it's there is some credibility to the technique. In September 1945, the US sent a team called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission to Japan to research and interview survivors of nuclear blasts. They located survivors just a few blocks from the explosion epicenter, who had been sheltered by concrete basements. They also heard stories of people who were killed just by shattering windows and falling debris. With just some ability to shelter, survivability might be higher than you suspect.

donretag 8y ago

Why does the BBC not use the NASA acronym?

airstrike 8y ago
Certain languages (British English and Portuguese, to name the two I know) dictate that if you pronounce the acronym as if it were a word, you only capitalize the first letter. Nasa and Nato, but NSA and WTO.
- ghaff 8y ago
  And in the US, non-proper nouns are often all lowercase even if they were originally acronyms. e.g. radar, laser, sonar, etc. And, even for proper nouns, things like programming languages often just has an initial cap although all caps is typically the technically correct form in US English.
- dyoo1979 8y ago
  Example reference: see the "abbreviations and acronyms" section in: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a Hilariously enough, "Nasa" is specifically called out as an negative example from the English Wikipedia style guidelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#Acronyms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Capi...
- mcguire 8y ago
  Doesn't the BBC still believe in a country called "Burma"?

Wildgoose 8y ago

It's possible that in 1178 an asteroid hit the Moon with a 120,000 megaton blast - an Extinction Event if it had hit the Earth. (By way of comparison, the Hiroshima Bomb was 15 kilotons). Recorded by monks at Canterbury at the time, and only a possibility - but something to consider. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_(crater) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno_(crater)

nkrisc 8y ago
According to the same page, more recent developments don't support the theory: > High-resolution images obtained by the Japanese satellite SELENE in 2008 were used to date the crater by counting the smaller craters within it and its ejecta deposits. This gave an age of 4(+6, −3) million years, much too old for the hypothesis.[2] > This raises the question of what the monks saw. An alternative theory holds that the monks just happened to be in the right place at the right time to see an exploding meteor coming at them and aligned with the Moon. This would explain why the monks were the only people known to have witnessed the event; such an alignment would only be observable from a specific spot on the Earth's surface.[8]
- hinkley 8y ago
  What the monks reported sounds like it might be consistent with the optical disturbances caused by superheated air: > From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon which was below writhed, as it were in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the Moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then, after these transformations, the Moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance. An air burst between observer and observed would move around on the wind, causing ripples to come and go.
  - nkrisc 8y ago

JoeDaDude 8y ago

This one was detected by satellite, but scientists have been using acoustic detection of meteorite explosions for some time. Fittingly, they used detectors made for nuclear explosions, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization's infrasound network [1]. I learned this from reading this highly recommended book on the subject: Asteroids: Relics of Ancient Time by Michael K. Shepard [2] (amazon link) [1] https://www.norsar.no/r-d/safe-society/nuclear-test-ban-monitoring/infrasound-monitoring/ https://www.norsar.no/r-d/safe-society/nuclear-test-ban-moni... [2] https://www.amazon.com/reader/110706144X?_encoding=UTF8&query=kiloton#reader_110706144X https://www.amazon.com/reader/110706144X?_encoding=UTF8&quer...

XzetaU8 8y ago
Vela Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident

vectorEQ 8y ago

"That's another thing we have in our defence, there's plenty of water on the planet." so that's what planetary defence people do :D since it's unrealistic to prepare to defend the planet actually, let's just point at things :D and call them out for being in our defence! :D we have mountains too! they are also in our defence!

cubano 8y ago

I mean, with all the money the US currently spends on military budgets, I can't for the life of me figure out why it is so hard to find the 50-100mil or so (estimated) it would cost for a few orbital IR telescopes and just deal with this problem once and for all. A Pegasus XL rocket can lift 976 pounds (443 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit for about $13.5 million...put two "budget" telescopes on one launch and get to work.

viach 8y ago
It is expected to happen only about 3 times in a century (from article). In other words, building this system of telescopes won't affect the next elections in any positive way.
- dfgert 8y ago
  NASA actually receive lots of funding(might be second after military). Most of their work doesn't align with any of the politics promises, even then they receive good chunk of budget spending.
  - viach 8y ago
    In the end, it's always about politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Political_opposition_to_NASA_funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Political_oppos...
    - joejerryronnie 8y ago
      Isn’t everything?
  - mturmon 8y ago
    NASA 2018 budget is $20.7B. It is not in any way "second after military". NIH 2018 budget is $37B, NSF is $7.8B. DOD budget just for R&D and test/evaluation is $88B.
    - 8y ago

kosei 8y ago

Womp womp, article didn't get picked up when I posted it last night. Guess I should have retitled / waited until morning! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418939

kempbellt 8y ago

The gods are angry