[meteorite-list] Search for Dangerous Asteroids Continues Despite Government Shutdown

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.space.com/23035-government-shutdown-dangerous-asteroids-search.html

Search for Dangerous Asteroids Continues Despite Government Shutdown
By Mike Wall
space.com
October 1, 2013

The U.S. government shutdown may have taken NASA's asteroid-warning Twitter 
feed offline, but it shouldn't affect the search for potentially hazardous 
space rocks much, scientists say.

NASA announced Monday (Sept. 30) that the Near Earth Object Office at 
the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., won't 
be sending out tweets from its @AsteroidWatch account during the government 
shutdown, which went into effect at midnight EDT today (Oct. 1).

But efforts to spot asteroids that could pose a threat to our planet - 
such as the Arizona-based Catalina Sky Survey, which has found the majority 
of new near-Earth objects for the past several years - should keep working 
normally for some time to come.

"The detection stuff is still going on," said Tim Spahr, director of the 
Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., the world clearinghouse for information 
about newly discovered asteroids and comets.

While most major asteroid-hunting projects in the United States are funded 
by NASA, they receive the grant money in widely spaced increments and 
so should not be affected by the shutdown unless it drags on for a considerable 
period of time, Spahr said.

"Those are typically yearly appointments, so you get your yearly allotment 
of money, and then you forget about it for a year," he told SPACE.com.

The situation is similar for many of the scientists who study the images 
collected by the Catalina Sky Survey, the Pan-STARRS telescope array and 
other projects. They rely on already-allocated NASA grant money, but they're 
not federal employees, so they can continue to work through the shutdown.

Most of the NASA workforce, on the other hand, is sitting home today. 
The shutdown - which resulted when the Senate and the House of Representatives 
failed to agree on an emergency spending bill - has forced the agency 
to furlough all but 550 or so of its 18,000 employees.

NASA has also ceased most of its operations, with the exception of efforts 
required to protect human life and property. The space agency is continuing 
to support the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, and 
it's maintaining currently operating scientific spacecraft.

But missions that have yet to leave the ground are in limbo for now. For 
example, preparations for the planned Nov. 18 launch of NASA's Mars Atmosphere 
and Volatile Evolution probe, or Maven, are currently frozen.

A slight delay wouldn't be a big problem for Maven, whose launch window 
extends until Dec. 7. But if the probe doesn't get off the ground by then, 
it will have to wait 26 months for the next favorable alignment of Earth 
and the Red Planet.