Can NASA’s New Planetary Defense Office Protect Earth From a Rogue Dwarf Planet Collision?

WESTMINSTER, Calif. - Jan. 17, 2016 - PRLog -- Not a snowball’s chance in hell, says science fiction author Howard Brian Edgar, whose debut novel RUNAWAY MOON (Amazon Kindle edition) depicts a rogue dwarf planet narrowly missing Earth and slamming into the Moon at 50,000 mph.

“NASA's claim that it will be ready if an asteroid comes too close to Earth is ridiculous,” says Edgar. “Considering the relative sizes of so many objects hurtling around the Universe, including asteroids and rogue planetoids much larger than the one that caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, NASA’s new $50 million Earth defense project is like trying to bring down an elephant with a toothpick.”

Though NASA has already spent millions developing and improving its asteroid or Near Earth Object (NEO) tracking capabilities, the agency is still incapable of monitoring the entirety of space around our planet. The relatively tiny asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 damaged over 1,500 buildings and sent 1,200 people to the hospital. The origin of that asteroid is still unknown.

“NASA didn’t see it coming, just as they don’t see the rogue dwarf planet twice the size of Texas coming until it’s too late in RUNAWAY MOON,” says Edgar. According to current estimates, about 70 dwarf planets are whipping through the outer Solar System and astronomers believe there may be 200 or more dwarf planets and thousands of supersize comets throughout the Kuiper Belt, an icy band of frozen planetoids on the edge of our Solar System.

“We live in a cosmic shooting gallery,” says Edgar. “It’s just a matter of time before we face a monster threat and a mass extinction level event from an object that’s simply too large and moving too fast to be stopped by NASA’s puny Planetary Defense Coordination Office.”

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