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Seventy-seven scientists, engineers and military experts from the United States, Europe, and Japan participated in the workshop. Its purpose was to consider the scientific requirements for avoidance and mitigation of hazards to the Earth due to asteroids and comets
The workshop put forward the following five recommendations:
Recommendation 1. That the National Aeronautics and Space Administration be
assigned the responsibility to acquire relevant scientific knowledge on the
compositional and physical properties of the diverse population of hazardous
objects that may threaten the Earth and on which the future development of a
reliable collision mitigation system could be based. In undertaking this
responsibility, the interests and cooperative support of the international
community should be welcomed.
Recommendation 2. That a new and appropriately funded program be instituted
at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, consistent with its
mission to "Understand and protect our home planet," to create an adequate
basis of scientific knowledge through space missions and supporting
Earth-based research on which future attempts to reliably mitigate impending
collisions of hazardous objects with the Earth can be founded.
Recommendation 3. That the congressionally mandated survey presently being
pursued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to catalog
near-Earth objects brighter than H~18 (~ 1 km in size), be extended to
include 90% of hazardous near-Earth objects down to a size range of 200 m
over the next decade.
Recommendation 4. That the Department of Defense increase the speed with
which it makes information about natural airburst phenomena available to the
public and other nations to prevent possible misinterpretations of these
small, frequent events.
Recommendation 5. That government and international policy makers act now to
formulate and publish an agreed upon chain of responsibility for action in
the event that an Earth-threatening object is discovered.
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