NASA pressed to avert catastrophic Deep Impact

0 Comments | AFP, November, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) — NASA penny-pinching risks exposing humankind to a planetary catastrophe if a big enough asteroid evades detection and slams into Earth, US lawmakers argued Thursday.

But the US space agency said the chances of a new "Near-Earth Object" (NEO), like the one that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, were too remote to divert scarce resources.

Scott Pace, head of program analysis and evaluation at NASA, said the agency could not do more to detect NEOs "given the constrained resources and the strategic objectives NASA already has been tasked with."

Pace and other NASA officials were grilled at a House of Representatives hearing on the NEO program, which seized the public imagination in the 1990s through movies like...