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… and the truck that he wants to put it on. Source: Supplied
Steven Howarth doesn’t ask for much. All he wants is to save humanity from instant extinction.
And he reckons that for about $200,000 he can do it.
Mr Howarth wants to build Australia’s first mobile observatory so he can drive around the country looking for asteroids that are about to hit Earth.
And so, like anyone else these days, he’s started an online crowd-funding campaign.
However, it would appear humankind’s hope for survival hangs very much in the balance. It has so far raised only $100.
Mr Howarth’s not-for-profit organisation “Earth Shield Program” aims to purchase a giant space telescope and place it on the back of a Mercedes Unimog truck, thereupon to roam the outback looking for any rogue rocks that might be headed our way.
An asteroid could get as close as just 11,000 miles from the Earth surface when it passes by our planet on March 5. WSJ’s Monika Auger reports. Photo: NASA
Ouch! What an asteroid might look like if it hits Earth.Source:The Advertiser
And while it’s fair to say his methods are unconventional — he is yet to get a meeting with a government minister and the CSIRO won’t return his calls — the idea is actually not as crazy as it sounds.
As news.com.au memorably reported this week: “You probably slept through it, but we were all nearly pulverised by a huge asteroid nicknamed ‘The Rock’ that hurtled perilously close to Earth last night.”
The 1.3km wide object swung past at around 117,482km/h just over 1.6 million km away, which in astronomical terms is a little too close for comfort.
Had it hit, it would have had the impact of 1,000 atomic bombs. It’s fair to say our biggest problem would no longer have been North Korea.
It’s this sort of thing that started keeping Mr Howarth up at night and so he decided to do something about it.
“I think the more I delved into it, the more I became interested and the more I became interested the more concerned I became,” he told news.com.au.
What is little known is that it is often amateur astronomers who spot these things, and Australia is extremely well placed for asteroid spotting.
A NASA image of asteroid 2014 JO25 which came within 1.6 million kilometres of Earth this week. Picture: AFP/NASASource:AFP
“We’re in the best part of the world to locate these objects,” Mr Howarth tells news.com.au.
“The ones who normally spot these objects are the smaller telescopes. They have a better view of these objects passing us than deep space telescopes.
“Amateur astronomers around the world are actually finding these objects and passing this information on.”
The telescope that Steven Howarth’s Earth Shield Program wants to buy …Source:Supplied
… and the truck that he wants to put it on. Source: SuppliedSource:Supplied
Once picked up, Mr Howarth said any object hurtling towards Earth could potentially be deflected by “gravitational shockwave displacement”, which would involve detonating a missile at the right point to knock it off course.
It is unclear precisely how this would work in practice, nor how advanced this technology is, and Mr Howarth admits it would certainly be very expensive.
However, as he points out: “It doesn’t take much for a country to be crippled by one of these things. So doing nothing about it is going to cost you a lot more than doing something about it.”
Australian National University astrophysicist Brad Tucker said it would require a rather large telescope and ongoing funding to make the project viable, and he didn’t see why it had to move around. However he was delighted by Mr Howarth’s enthusiasm.
“One thing Australia does not do is fund a Near-Earth Object program to search for asteroids. The one we had going, the Uppsala Survey at Siding Spring, which was funded by NASA, had its funding cut. Therefore, it is awesome to see the public trying to make up for the slack,” he told news.com.au.
“The problem is that to find the asteroids we need to find, the small to medium-sized ones between 5 and 100 metres, we need a large telescope (about 1-1.2 metres), wide field of view and, more importantly, funding to keep it running.”
Aside from saving the planet from asteroids, Mr Howarth also hopes the Earth Shield Program will be able to visit remote schools and get kids excited about astronomy and space — as he most certainly is.
And while Mr Howarth has had little luck with ministers, he says has gauged interest from several Lord Mayors.
“Including Hobart,” he adds.
