Both impressive and the results of Atlas since operation shows it's doing a great job. A space-based telescope system would be able to do so much more, especially since it wouldn't have the limitations of only scanning the night sky that a ground one does. A key point - any impactor that is in a orbit similar to Earth's is that the last years of its path will be from the Sun side of the planet. The sooner we see anything and can calculate mass and vectors the sooner we can do any action that we might be able to do. Another key point - to be able to do anything like deflection we have to get to the object first long before its arrival, so knowing years in advance is crucial.

My only critique is that the times on the clock didn't have a longer gap to reflect the brain mulling over the issue before each suggestion.

We'll never find them all if you include ones that are perturbed from the outer parts of the system to fall inward. And we'll definitely not find ones in time without a better search and detection program. Relying on amateur astronomers and rare free time at the major telescopes, both only done at night, it pretty limited and why so many near passes are discovered after they do pass and not before.

I do wonder if there's any validity in Asimov's prologue for Rama, where Spaceguard uses a nuclear blast (neutron?) to generate a radar image of the system to map just about everything. Of course Rama was conveniently not in this scan.

It actually validates the claim. There is still no known threat in the next 100 years.

So was the Zero. Well, parts of it.

I can say for certain that a Zero does not hold up well to a Sidewinder.

music builds

"We're not going to make it, are we?"

Tunguska or the more recent Chelyabinsk meteor were larger objects. Estimates of Tunguska are around a 50 meter icy body and the more recent one was around 20 meters. An 8 meter body means a lot less mass and effect.

Tunguska was a lot more impactful because of its probable angle of impact based on the patterns of the explosion, getting it lower before it detonated from the pressures. Chelyabinsk would have been a lot worse had it also been that straight of an angle in, but less total area affected for the same reason.

Knowing what's out there is the first step. Perhaps if we knew there were a lot more and the odds were good one would hit soon, there'd be more push to fund doing whatever we could to intercept. Plus getting better ways to detect and project paths leads to a longer time knowing a better final target, so even if we couldn't do anything, having days instead of hours to move people from a city would be worth it.

It's how hurricane and other storms used to be vs. what we know now. We can't do much of anything about the smaller threats of tornadoes, but we still try to improve accuracy of time and location.

Revisiting this because I went out and the Moon was visible, based on the phase of the Moon Orion is to the right from our viewpoint in our sky, so therefore the North pole is facing down to match up.

If you go by NASA's orbital diagram on the Artemis website and assume that Orion is actually turned the way they depict (following the path), then you would be correct, the shot we see here is "upside down". But I don't know if that's the case, and can't find anyone with a live orbital chart showing its exact position.