Canadian Satellite to Spot Killer Asteroids

A one-of-a-kind, $12-million satellite mission to be launched by the Canadian Space Agency in 2010 will track at least some of the tens of thousands of large asteroids within striking distance of Earth.

The satellite, called the Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat), will give researchers a whole new view of space. Instead of looking for asteroids with large telescopes in observatories, researchers will get to see the skies from the point of view of the satellite -- 24/7 data from areas not normally visible from earthbound telescopes.

The satellite, designed to be more manoeuverable than the Hubble Space Telescope, will be able to twist and move in space, giving researchers an unprecedented range of view while tracking moving bodies.

He said when he was in graduate school, research about asteroid collisions with Earth would have been laughed at. That changed with the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which scientists believe was the site of an impact that may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.

"You could point to this example and say, 'Look, it happened once, it destroyed a lot of life on Earth. You have to take this seriously,'" said Hildebrand at a technical briefing for media Thursday.

"Now, of course, because of movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact, most people know about it. What did it cost to produce one of those movies? It must have been $200 million. All the asteroid tracking efforts are still less than that. We still haven't re-ordered our priorities enough to this theory."

The asteroid tracking mission will repeatedly survey the area from ±45-70° solar elongation with the aim of finding >50% of all inner-earth asteroids having diameters greater than 1 km.