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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