NASA–NNSA planetary defense partnership

NASA–NNSA planetary defense partnership

Announced	June 2015
Parties	NASA; the National Nuclear Security Administration (U.S. Department of Energy)
Laboratories	Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia
Lead agency	NASA
Purpose	Detecting and deflecting asteroids and comets that could hit Earth
Date	22 March 2017
Topics	Beings & bodies (topic), Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Government programs (topic)
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 186
Year	2017 in UFO history
Timeline	2017 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	14

The NASA–NNSA planetary defense partnership is an agreement between NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the part of the U.S. Department of Energy that runs the country's nuclear-weapons laboratories, to work together on "planetary defense": finding asteroids and comets that might strike Earth and working out how to push them aside. NASA is the lead agency. Scientists at the NNSA's Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories model what spacecraft impacts and nuclear explosions would do to an asteroid, while NASA supplies the astronomy and the mission design.^[1][12][13] The agreement was reported in June 2015.^[5] It appears in UFO literature because an anonymous timeline of UAP-related events, included in the journalist Michael Shellenberger's written testimony to a House Oversight hearing in November 2024, listed it and speculated that NNSA offices might hold UAP information. The timeline itself said nothing in the public record links the planetary-defense work to UAP.^[14]

Background: Chelyabinsk and the Russian link

• On 15 February 2013 a meteor about 17 metres across exploded 23 km above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk with the energy of a 450-kiloton nuclear weapon, according to Physics Today. No one died, but more than 1,600 people were hurt, mostly by glass from windows broken by the shock wave, and local hospitals were overwhelmed.^[1] The magazine Inverse described the object as a 7,000-ton meteoroid and said the event helped prompt the NASA–NNSA agreement.^[5]
• At the time, U.S. and Russian national laboratories were still collaborating under arrangements dating from just after the Cold War. Don Cook, then director of defense programs and deputy administrator at the NNSA, who oversaw the U.S. weapons labs, told Physics Today that it was natural for Russian lab directors to ask their American counterparts for help with a future strike, and he arranged for the U.S. labs to take part in a joint research effort.^[1]
• Cook met resistance from staff at the National Security Council. They suspected the weapons labs might use an asteroid programme as a pretext for resuming nuclear testing, should an existing warhead prove unsuitable for use against an asteroid. Those sceptics were satisfied, Physics Today reported, when NASA and the NNSA signed a memorandum of understanding naming NASA as the lead agency.^[1]
• Collaboration with Russia ended in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea soured relations, but the U.S. programme kept growing.^[1]

The agreement

• Inverse, writing on 22 June 2015, said NASA and the NNSA had announced the partnership "last week". The article linked to a New York Times report of 19 June 2015 and quoted Kevin Greenaugh, a senior NNSA official, as telling the Times that "it's a big step forward" whenever several agencies come together for the common defence. Inverse said the details of the work were being kept under wraps.^[5] The Times article itself was not read for this entry.^[11]
• The earlier version of this article dated the signing to 2017, and the timeline it drew on gave 22 March 2017 as the date the NNSA "publicly discloses" the partnership. The June 2015 reports, and Physics Today's description in February 2017 of the memorandum as already signed, show the agreement is older than that.^[1][5][14] No source read here explains where the 2017 date came from.
• Under the arrangement, scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center supply astrodynamics and spacecraft mission design, while the NNSA and its three laboratories model the effects of kinetic impactors (spacecraft rammed into an asteroid) and nuclear explosive devices on the target.^[13] The NNSA's own planetary-defense page lists the labs' contributions as nuclear-explosives expertise, three-dimensional multi-physics simulation codes, high-performance computers, estimates of how an impact would couple into the ground, underground effects and ocean interactions, and the ability to characterise an asteroid's composition, material strength and failure behaviour.^[12]
• The NNSA describes planetary defense as part of an official national-security focus, coordinated with NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office and with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It says the work also helps the labs with their main nuclear-security missions.^[12] Greenaugh, by then the NNSA's assistant deputy administrator for strategic partnership programs, told Physics Today that the modelling trains young scientists on physics problems relevant to the weapons programme, and that results on how materials behave during impacts were being fed into weapons simulations.^[1]
• An NNSA spokesperson could not give Physics Today a figure for the labs' spending; the work was treated as part of their programmatic budget. Lindley Johnson, head of NASA's planetary defense office, said U.S. asteroid detection and mitigation then employed about 250 people on a budget of $50 million a year, up from $10 million before the interagency programme began. He said it really needed about $250 million a year, including $150–200 million a year for five or six years to build a space-based infrared telescope.^[1] The NNSA has posted a video titled "Planetary Defense: Overview" on its YouTube channel; the timeline linked to it, with a typing error in the address. Only the video's title and channel were checked for this entry.^[8]

Joint research

• A NASA–NNSA study presented at the International Academy of Astronautics' Planetary Defense Conference in May 2017 was built around three case studies: deflecting the potentially hazardous asteroid 101955 Bennu, deflecting the small moon of the asteroid 65803 Didymos, and deflecting a scaled-down version of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. These were the targets of the OSIRIS-REx, DART and Rosetta missions.^[13]
• A longer paper from the same programme, "Options and uncertainties in planetary defense", appeared in Acta Astronautica (vol. 143, February 2018). Its fifteen authors came from NASA Goddard and the three labs; they included Brent Barbee, Megan Bruck Syal, Galen Gisler, Kevin Greenaugh, Joseph Nuth and Catherine Plesko. The paper examined how long it would take to respond once a threatening object is found. It concluded that a kinetic impactor is preferred whenever practical, but that large uncertainties or a short warning time make it less suitable and eventually insufficient. The authors proposed a single spacecraft design that could act as a kinetic impactor or carry a nuclear explosive, and tested their tools on a simulated impactor closely modelled on Bennu, the best-studied near-Earth object.^[2]
• Los Alamos researchers have continued to present the work publicly. One example is Catherine Plesko's report "Planetary Defense: Asteroids, Comets, Impact Craters, and Outwitting the Dinosaurs" (LA-UR-21-27461), listed on the Energy Department's OSTI database; only its catalogue record could be read.^[9][10]

Kinetic and nuclear deflection

• A kinetic impactor needs at least ten years' warning to build and fly to its target. An asteroid expected to hit with less notice might need a bigger push, such as a nuclear detonation. Livermore physicist Megan Bruck Syal told Physics Today that objects larger than 300 metres would probably need a nuclear deflection, and that modelling showed an existing weapon could deflect a near-Earth object up to 1 km across. No one had proposed a nuclear demonstration.^[1]
• In space a nuclear blast produces no air blast. Instead, radiation, mainly X-rays, would vaporise the asteroid's surface and create a rocket-like blow-off that pushes the body the other way. Los Alamos scientist Catherine Plesko said a deflection must speed up or slow down the asteroid in its orbit, because blowing it apart would take more energy and leave fragments that would all need tracking.^[1]
• Goddard's Joseph Nuth argued that response time must fall below a year from confident detection to launch, and urged that a ready-made interceptor be built and kept on hand at a cost of several hundred million dollars. Johnson disagreed. He said such a craft would probably never be used, would be costly to maintain and would go out of date, and that the money was better spent finishing the asteroid survey.^[1]
• Plesko put Bennu's chance of hitting Earth about 200 years from now at about 1 in 2,000. Gisler's modelling suggested that an object of 300 metres or less striking the ocean could raise a wave several hundred metres high that would die away faster than an earthquake tsunami. Away from coasts, the main effect would be huge amounts of water vapour injected into the stratosphere, which could affect the climate.^[1]

The wider U.S. programme

• NASA formally set up its Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) in January 2016, headed by Lindley Johnson, previously its near-Earth object programme executive, inside the Planetary Science Division. The office supervises NASA-funded searches for near-Earth objects, coordinates interagency and intergovernmental response planning with FEMA, the Department of Defense and international partners, and issues notices of close passes and warnings of potential impacts. At its launch more than 13,500 near-Earth objects were known, over 95 percent of them found since NASA-funded surveys began in 1998. The fiscal 2016 budget included $50 million for near-Earth object work, more than ten times the figure at the start of the Obama administration.^[3][7]
• In August 2015 NASA and FEMA signed the charter of a Planetary Impact Emergency Response Working Group, an interagency team to prepare for a predicted or actual impact on the United States. Its coordinating agencies include the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Homeland Security's science and technology directorate, the Department of Defense and the State Department's Office of Space and Advanced Technology. The charter noted there was then no national policy covering this threat.^[6] The earlier version of this article described this as joint "impact-response exercises"; the cited source describes a planning charter rather than exercises.
• By January 2017 about 15,000 near-Earth asteroids and 107 comets had known orbits, about 1,700 of them classed as potentially hazardous. NASA had long since met a 1998 commitment to Congress to find at least 90 percent of objects larger than 1 km, but an estimated 3,500 objects of 300–1,000 metres and about 14,500 of 140–300 metres were still undiscovered. Johnson estimated there were well over 10 million objects between 20 and 70 metres across. The proposed NEOCam infrared telescope, which he said could have cut the time needed to find all objects of 100 metres or more from three or four decades to about one, lost out in January 2017 to the Lucy and Psyche missions.^[1]

The DART test

• In early 2017 the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was still a proposal, expected to cost about $250 million and to hit one member of the binary asteroid Didymos at 6 km/s. Europe's companion Asteroid Impact Mission, which was meant to watch the collision, was not approved by ESA ministers in December 2016.^[1]
• DART, built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and funded through the PDCO, launched on 24 November 2021. On 26 September 2022 it struck Dimorphos, the roughly 160-metre moonlet of Didymos, at about 23,000 km/h, some 10.9 million km from Earth. The impact shortened Dimorphos's orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes, far beyond the 73-second success threshold, mostly because of recoil from the debris it blasted off. The spacecraft weighed 610 kg and cost US$330 million. Neither asteroid threatened Earth.^[4] DART's moonlet was one of the case studies in the joint NASA–NNSA research.^[13]

UAP speculation

• The anonymous timeline in Shellenberger's testimony (page 186) lists the partnership under 22 March 2017. It says the NNSA's Office of Defense Programs sponsors technical research and that the NNSA may hold relevant UAP information it has not reported to bodies such as the UAP Task Force.^[14]
• The same entry adds a note that nothing in the public record suggests the planetary-defense work is UAP-related. It argues that the defense-programs office might nonetheless house some UAP-related research, and points out that Los Alamos is managed by Triad National Security LLC, which the timeline says also develops next-generation aerospace platforms. Its sources are the NNSA video and the Los Alamos report listed above.^[8][9][14]
• None of the sources describing the partnership mentions UAP, and none offers evidence for the timeline's suggestion.^[1][12]

People and topics

• NASA — The U.S. civilian space agency, created in 1958.
• Department of Energy — The U.S. department that runs the nuclear weapons laboratories.

On the Timeline

• DeLonge's research groups (2016) (31 August 2016) — Tom DeLonge says he became involved with groups studying crashed craft and biology.
• Aircraft as pilot prosthetic (Forgotten Languages) (27 March 2017) — An anonymous website publishes an article about making aircraft an extension of the pilot.

See every 2017 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Double Asteroid Redirection Test”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.