It has recently discovered a satellite around one of them, which provides information about the asteroid's interior structure. Arecibo radar measurements provide the most precise orbits for these objects, from which the best assessment of their hazard to the Earth can be made.

The research is part of NASA's program to identify, by 2008, all objects larger than 1 km with near-Earth orbits and to characterize a portion of them. The U.S. Congress mandated this program several years ago.

NASA currently funds a number of search and follow-up programs to find these near-Earth objects and to determine their orbits. With no additional funding to meet the Congressional mandate, NASA has carved $3.55M out of other portions of its planetary astronomy research and analysis program in FY2002.

The Arecibo program is unique in the precision of its measurements and its ability to characterize these targets, but pressure from increasing costs in the search and recovery programs required to meet the 2008 deadline, with no increase in funding for the program to do the job, has caused NASA to cannibalize other programs.

Arecibo is the latest victim.

NASA has invested $11M in the Arecibo facility to upgrade it for carrying out radar studies of solar system objects as distant as the moons of Saturn (in support of the Cassini mission), but now has no funding to make the observations.

NASA research programs have been level-funded over the past decade while costs have increased and new research programs have been inserted.

The agency has recently committed to increase funds for its research programs at the rate of inflation and provide some new funding for astrobiology. In such a constrained fiscal environment, NASA says that asteroid characterization "may have to take a back seat" to NEO search and recovery because it "can no longer do everything it is supposed to do".

In the meantime, the rest of NASA's observational astronomy program and mission support suffer and a substantial investment in a national facility is abandoned.

The Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society believes that the Arecibo program should not be terminated to meet an arbitrary deadline.

The Congressional language says that these goals should be achieved "to the extent practicable" not at all costs. The NASA NEO search program is already making excellent progress.

In the long term we call on the Administration to work with the Congress to increase the resources for non-astrobiology research programs in NASA Space Science as they provide the knowledge base on which our solar system exploration efforts rely.

Radar Images from last week's Asteroid Flyby of Earth

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