Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) introduced legislation this week that would authorize funding for NASA to carry out searches of near Earth objects (NEOs). The “George R. Brown Near-Earth Object Survey Act” (HR 3813) is a short bill that can be summarized in this single sentence taken directly from the bill: “The [NASA] Administrator shall plan, develop, and implement a Near-Earth Object Survey program to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize the physical characteristics of near-Earth asteroids and comets equal to or greater than 100 meters in diameter in order to assess the threat of such near-Earth objects in striking the Earth.” The bill would authorize $20 million in FY2005 and 2006 for the survey, and also require NASA to submit an annual report on the search to Congress for five years. The bill was introduced Wednesday and referred to the House Science Committee; no futher action has yet been announced.
The naming of this bill is a little odd (at least to me.) The most famous George R. Brown was a Houston businessman (for whom that city’s convention center is named), but with only nebulous ties to NASA in general (his company, Brown and Root, helped build the Johnson Space Center) and nothing with NEOs. There was a Congressman George E. Brown, a Democrat from California, who led the House Science Committee back in the early 1990s and expressed an interest in NEO searches, however (read a quote from him at the end of this 1995 AIAA position paper on the NEO threat.) It’s not clear if the bill title is a typo or a reference to another George R. Brown out there somewhere…
(Thanks to Marc Schlather of ProSpace for pointing out the existence of this legislation.)
