Hi R.L. -

Actually, I'm not hostile towards manned Mars missions - in point of fact, before we can do them, it's going to be necessary to run long range rovers to assure that there is no back contamination problem, and currently my good friend Dr. Daniel Usikov pretty much has a world wide lock on the artificially intelligent robotic vision systems these rovers are going to need - though whether that lock will hold over the next 5 years or so remains to be seen - oh well -

But dealing with the NEO problem is going to require a significant chunk of change - what I want is enough warning to get people into shelters or away from coastal areas, and to get nuclear power plants shut down in the impact areas -

How to do it? The best thing I can think of is something like lunar based man tended telescopes -

http://www.geocities.com/epgrondine

The ticket would be to get Bush Jr. to pick up the "back to the Moon, this time to stay" part of his father's program - the cost is not that bad if done with commercial launchers, and we already have factories in place for the modules (the ones being used for ISS). Also, this would fill up the hole between ISS completion in 2006 and manned Mars in the late 20-teens.

In the meantime, the UK NEO telescope and another one in the Northern hemisphere would help - plus the first space based NEO telescopes, maybe a small launcher class mission, something like Canada's NESS -

You're right about Mars' craters - we really need software developed to do a good crater count on the MGS data - and we need funding for detailed crater counts on the Galileo imagery of Jupiter's moons.

We need to get NASA to move it's detection goal down from 1 kilometer sized impactors, first to 300 meter diameter continent killers, and second to 75 meter diameter city busters.

One ammendment in Congress has ear marked $10.5 million per year for the NEO detection task - but what we really need is the late Representative Brown's ammendment assigning the NEO lead task to NASA, and making them responsible -
NASA could come up with detailed cost proposals for the various options, and present them to the Congress for their consideration -

In sum, I'm not hostile to manned Mars, I just think we should put the people on Earth ahead of people on Mars -

ep