PENTAGON IN MISSILE PLAN TO SAVE WOLD

March 24, 1996
The Sunday Times newspaper / by James Adams - Washington

Asteroids threatening to collide with Earth are the new targets of the Pentagon, which finds itself with missiles to fire but nothing much to shoot at after the thawing of the cold war.

The US air force is sponsoring a project, codenamed Clementine 2, to develop probes to intercept asteroids in deep space. The project intends to test new missile guidance systems by destroying asteroids before they crash into Earth.

Clementine 2 will also have a direct influence on America's ability to defend itself against incoming ballistic missiles from other countries - a plan that used to be known as star wars and has been officially abandoned.

A Titan rocket will launch a spacecraft into orbit about 10m miles above Earth. For a year the satellite will track asteroids and on a command from Earth will release three probes. They will use their own optical navigation sensors to lock on to different asteroids and strike them at speeds of up to 11 miles per second.

Cameras on the probes and the spacecraft will record the impacts using the same technology that would be needed to track and kill enemy missiles or satellites.

The probes will carry no explosives; instead the aim is to demonstrate it is possible to hit fast moving asteroids and to measure how the impact afects their trajectories. In some cases the high speed impact alone could be enough to cause the asteroids to disintergrate.

If the experiment fails or the targets were different, such as incoming ballistic missiles, the probes could be armed with explosives.

At first sight the likelihood of Earth being hit by an asteroid may appear about the same as a pedestrian in a city street being hit by a stray golf ball; but scientists insist there is a real threat.

"An asteroid big enough to destroy a large city hits the Earth roughly once every century," said John Pike, director of space policy of the Federation of American Scientists. Other have calculated the probability of a large object colliding with the planet during a persons lifetime is 10 times greater than the risk of dying in an air crash.

The American air force has provided 120 million dollars for the Clementine project because it is hoping to extract double value from its money: it will keep the air force in the star wars game while enabling its scientists to study the latest technology for tracking targets in space.

The star wars scheme, which envisaged a shield of radars, missiles and satellites, was a casualty of the end of the cold war and the releaxing of superpower tensions. Today America officially has no defence against ballistic missiles; but the CIA believes that an attack with missiles launched from countries such as Iran, Libya and North Korea is a serious threat.

Last week Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, and Newt Gingrich, leader of the House of Representatives, announced they would sponsor legislation that would force the Pentagon to develop a national system to defend against missile attack.

If passed, the new legislation would require America to deploy a missile defence system by 2003.

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