{"id":3579,"date":"2012-07-09T10:15:37","date_gmt":"2012-07-09T00:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/?p=3579"},"modified":"2012-07-09T10:15:37","modified_gmt":"2012-07-09T00:15:37","slug":"critical-asteroid-telescope-might-shut-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/2012\/07\/critical-asteroid-telescope-might-shut-down-3579.html","title":{"rendered":"Critical Asteroid Telescope Might Shut Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

More evidence that global governments are incredibly ignorant of the serious asteroid threat. Detection of asteroids is severely under-funded, even though it has the best long-term cost-benefit ratio of almost anything they could pay for. An Australian telescope at the Sliding Spring observatory, the only one searching for asteroids in a particular region of the sky, lost its U.S. funding last year, and unless somebody fronts up with $180K this month, it will be shut down.\u00a0 Leaving us blind to a potential killer asteroid.<\/p>\n

Catalina uses a range of\u00a0northern hemisphere telescopes – and the Sliding Spring Survey. But in October, Catalina cut off cash to the survey due to growing costs, caused partly by changes in the exchange rate between the Australian and US dollars. That decision was “very difficult”, says Steve Larson, who heads Catalina.<\/p>\n
Since then, the southern survey has been limping along with temporary funding from the Australian National University in Canberra, but the extension is set to expire at the end of July, says survey operator Rob McNaught. [New Scientist<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More evidence that global governments are incredibly ignorant of the serious asteroid threat. Detection of asteroids is severely under-funded, even though it has the best long-term cost-benefit ratio of almost anything they could pay for. An Australian telescope at the Sliding Spring observatory, the only one searching for asteroids in a particular region of the sky, lost its U.S. funding last year, and unless somebody fronts up with $180K this month, it will be shut down.\u00a0 Leaving us blind to a potential killer asteroid.
\nCatalina uses a range of\u00a0northern hemisphere telescopes – and the Sliding Spring Survey. But in October, Catalina cut off cash to the survey due to growing costs, caused partly by changes in the exchange rate between the Australian and US dollars. That decision was “very difficult”, says Steve Larson, who heads Catalina.
\nSince then, the southern survey has been limping along with temporary funding from the Australian National …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asteroids","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3579"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3588,"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions\/3588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/survive2012.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}