E.L.E.

Is An Asteroid Coming? The Proposed Budget For NASA’s ‘Planetary Defense Coordination Office’ Is Suddenly Increased To $150 Million

It didn’t make many national headlines, but the proposed budget for NASA’s “Planetary Defense Coordination Office” was just increased by 90 million dollars.  At a time when our national budget is already stretched to the max, this seems like an odd thing to be spending so much money on.  As you will see below, the “Planetary Defense Coordination Office” is only two years old, and it is in charge of tracking threats posed by near-Earth objects such as asteroids.  Needless to say, if a giant asteroid suddenly hit our planet it would be the greatest catastrophe in modern times and for those of us that survived our lives would be radically different from then on.  So the threat is real, but in recent years NASA has assured the public that there are no imminent threats.  Has that now changed? (Read More...)

Why Has The White House Suddenly Released A Strategy For Dealing With The Threat Of A Catastrophic Meteor Impact?

Meteor Impact - Public DomainDoes the White House know something that the rest of us do not? As the Obama administration draws to a close, the White House has suddenly released a major document that details a multi-pronged strategy for dealing with the threat of a catastrophic meteor impact. Most of us remember movies such as “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” that attempted to depict what such a crisis would look like, but up until fairly recently the U.S. government has never seemed to take this kind of threat very seriously. (Read More...)