NASA Calls for Help in Search for Threatening Asteroids

NASA announced Tuesday its plans to shoulder the work of locating asteroids that pose a threat to human populations, as well as knowing what to do about them, with anyone willing to offer a helping hand.

The effort, which represents the latest Grand Challenge, will represent a large-scale and multi-disciplinary collaboration based on a variety of partnerships with other government agencies, international partners, industry, academia and "citizen scientists."

Developed by the Obama administration, Grand Challenges are a part of the presidents Strategy for American Innovation and includes initiatives dedicated to resolving important societal and economic problems.

"I applaud NASA for issuing this Grand Challenge because finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort," Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a press release.

According to NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, the challenge is designed to augment and not replace the agency's labor in the area.

"NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," she said.

The agency also released a request for information inviting potential partners to offer ideas on accomplishing the goals, including exploring an asteroid.

Open for 30 days, responses will be used to help develop public engagement opportunities as well as an industry workshop slotted to take place in September, according to those overseeing the project.

NASA's call reflects a growing reliance on others to further American space missions, the most prominent of which is the use of privately-owned SpaceX Dragon shuttles to ferry supplies to and from the International Space Station. The space agency also took a hit from the recent budget sequester, which resulted in lost funding for public outreach programs designed to grow an interest in the agency and its missions as well as space exploration in general.

Furthermore, the announcement comes shortly after Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, spoke at the International Space Development conference, arguing that the best way to destroy an asteroid is the one described in the 1998 movie "Armageddon." This includes planting a bomb inside of an asteroid and blowing it up into smaller pieces more likely to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. However, the cost for such a task, Wie estimates, falls around the $1 billion mark.

And that is money NASA simply doesn't have.