Priorities

Last Sunday a comet or asteroid hit Jupiter, leaving a hole in the clouds about the size of the Pacific ocean. Good thing that Jupiter's gravitational field captured this object - it helped to keep us safe. But what is worrying is that an object that size was completely undetected until it hit.

As I pointed out in my March posting Why aren’t earth-crossing asteroids a priority?, any rational ordering of priorities would put a lot more money toward finding and tracking all the dangerous earth-crossing asteroids in our neighborhood. The odds of being hit by a large (1km+ in diameter) asteroid aren't large in any given year, but the consequences are enormous. If the one that hit Jupiter last Sunday had hit us instead, probably all life on earth would have been extinguished. One would think that might warrant more attention and money than it seems to get.