Hi Mark -

The new JPL neo pages are real nice, and that new JPL stats page is particularly effective. Its about time Baalke gave Yeomans some more of his own or his staff's time. Only current flaw its that the "Search Programs" list lacks a link to the new Chinese NEO search effort, but then this is a new program. Yeomans colleague on the Chinese historical record search (Yang? - memory fails) should be able to give Baalke some help there.

Moving on to the business at hand, note that DCT is being funded by private philanthropy - it was not funded by the government. DCT comes in at 4.2 meters, while all current goverment funded searches, including ESA and Japan, use scopes of no more than a little over 1 meter.

Now compare that with the resources the cosmologists (and AF space reconnaisance) have available:

http://www.eso.org/projects/owl/Links.html#Already_quite_large

What's wrong with this picture, and how did it come about?

It runs right back to academia. Traditionally, the cosmologists sneered at the grad students working on asteroids, and gave them absolutely no respect... they wre considered as being "slow", as after all, they weren't working on the "big" problems that afffected the study of nuclear physics... Awareness of the impact hazard within academia was zero at the time... This was before Shoemaker and Alvarez...

With that historical legacy, you end up with "senior" astronomical bureaucrats who give public money to their cosmologist colleagues, who are also their friends: the NEA and NEC folks still get no respect, and have no "standing"...

This applies not only in the US, where for instance Weiler comes out of the cosmologist school, worked on Hubble, and funds grand scopes while penny pinching the JPL NEO effort, but it also applies in Europe, and to some degree in Japan...

I will admit that the field of view of these large scopes is limited, but they could be doing follow-up work, and compiling some detailed spectra and size information...

My plan, if these old codgers don't heartily endorse Mazanek's Moon based impactor detection system, is to turn up the heat on them by demanding more time on existing scopes... and maybe even "mods" to exising large scopes (!) to handle the task... other goals are sufficient resoluton and time on the immediately coming infra-red space based scopes, and first priority for radar time on existing rigs...

This effort will start approximately two to three months from now.

Garvin got it right, THE immediate problem is "accretion"... (for instance, there's no way to date Mars processes until the accretion rate is firmed up, or processes on other bodies, for that matter)... once accretion is adequately funded, THEN earth-like planets around other stars and the resolution of fundamental questions of physics come in...

once again, thanks for the post,
Ed