DOTLAN EveMaps

u'Earth is in serious danger from 20-300m asteroids, that can strike with few weeks warning, and which no government has a defence against. But you can help make an efficient defence a reality within a few years, joining thousands of others in the Hall of Heroes.

There is around a million asteroids defined as potential threats to Earth, most of them untracked, resulting in a relative big risk for short warning threats to suddenly appear. Earth currently has no defense ready against them. EADP\u2019s mission is to ensure that we, as soon as possible, have an efficient asteroid defense in place against the 20-300m asteroids that NASA and its partners are currently least adept at handling. Our primary focus is to be ready so that next time an asteroid is coming towards a populated area, such as the one exploding onto Chelyabinsk in 2013, we have means to prevent the potentially extreme damage of these so-called \u2018city-killers\u2019.

You might have never heard of it, but small asteroids measuring a few meters or so hit Earth\u2019s atmosphere all the time - about once every two weeks on average. These small asteroids and so-called meteorites usually dissipate harmlessly in the atmosphere, causing the shooting stars you can see in the sky.

However, the threat of a larger asteroid actually hitting the Earth and causing a catastrophic impact is very real. Still, it remains poorly understood and severely under-researched - even today.

Scientists, engineers and governments only recently began conducting surveys and tracking the asteroids, comets, and Near-Earth-Objects (NEOs) that could potentially hit our planet. They\u2019ve discovered about 12,000 near-Earth asteroids and comets so far, of which around 800 to 1,000 are larger than 1 kilometer in diameter (about 0.6 miles). If one of those larger objects were to hit Earth, it would cause a severe global catastrophe.

Even the small asteroids are a big problem however - there are a lot more of them, they are harder to find in the sky and even a 30-300m asteroid can wipe out a major city, causing millions of casualties. They do not hit often, the last one was in 2013 over Chelyabinsk and the previous one in 1908 over Tunguska, but when they hit, it is a disaster. So even when you take out the threat from big asteroids, which we are already quite in control of, you are still about as likely to be killed by an asteroid as to be killed in an airplane crash...

The good news is that we can do something about this - scientists at the Asteroid Deflection Research Center have already researched a small remote controlled spacecraft which can target and destroy incoming asteroids, even with very short warning, and NASA can test it.

It costs around $500 million for space agencies to make such an emergency mission in total, saving on average more than a million lives sooner or later - and EADP can get the spacecraft ready for emergency use for just $100 million (see Mission below) - that yields a cost-per-life-saved less than $100-500 per life, or just $2.5-12.5 per life-year for EADP asteroid defence, cheaper than any other way of saving human lives today.
(You can read much more about this in the FAQ on our scientific webpage, if you want).

But because few understands the threat and even fewer want to pay for it (see the video above), that budget is never given by governments. That is why EADP works to get this spacecraft and mission financed, as soon as possible - we do not need even $100 million for a start however; the work is split in many smaller parts, so every dollar and helping hand brings us faster towards having an efficient asteroid defence before the next asteroid strikes.'