Clarifying roles
After the January AL00667 event, Lindley Johnson, the NEO chief at NASA Headquarters, sent a memo to Yeomans, Chapman and other asteroid researchers clarifying that he, Johnson, should be called by Yeomans if a serious and immediate threat were ever deemed real.
Yeomans has known this for months and has had Johnson's phone number, Johnson and Chapman say.
"I think the system worked the way it was supposed to," Johnson says of the winter scare.
He credits the Minor Planet Center for having quickly sought follow-up observations, as it routinely does for any potentially threatening object. And importantly, unlike a half-dozen or so other asteroid scares dating back to the late 1990s, this one did not play out in the media, but rather was resolved by astronomers before the any public false alarms were sounded.
Johnson allows that the chain of command was informal, "and still is until we draft a formal plan. But we always kind of knew that if we got a call from the astronomers -- in particular Don Yeomans -- about how we'd handle it back here. There are only two to three layers of bureaucracy between me and the administrator [Sean O'Keefe]. So it's not like it would take much time to get the word up."
What O'Keefe would do with any such information is not spelled out anywhere.
"To my knowledge there's been no discussions at that level as to what would be done," said Johnson, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who served 23 years in the U.S. Air Force. "It's going to be up to him [O'Keefe] to take it from there." Johnson said that the plan he's formalizing might "prompt O'Keefe to think, 'Okay now what do I do?'"
Johnson stresses out that NASA's directive has been limited to conducting a scientific survey for the larger objects right now.
"We have not been authorized or appropriated funding to be operating a network capable of providing accurate and credible warning for near term (hours to days) impacts, be they large or small objects," he said.
