PasadenaAsteroid 2026 JH2 passed inside lunar distance Monday.
Near-Earth objects this size are found only when already inbound — survey systems can’t resolve them until days out, leaving no deflection window.
NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX probe, en route to track Apophis in 2029, faces cancellation under Trump’s 2027 budget request.
Sources: NBC News
THE SIZE GAP
NASA was congressionally mandated in 2005 to catalog 90% of near-Earth objects 140 meters and larger. For objects smaller than that — city-killers, not civilization-enders — there is no mandate and no complete catalog. Most are found after they have already passed.
WHY THEY ARRIVE UNSEEN
Asteroids on Earth-approach trajectories are often coming from the direction of the sun. Ground telescopes cannot point at the daytime sky; the object is lost in solar glare until it has swept past Earth and is visible against the night sky on the way out. Chelyabinsk in 2013 was detected zero seconds before it exploded over Russia.
THE DEFLECTION WINDOW
Nudging an asteroid off course requires years of warning, not days. The change in velocity needed is tiny — centimeters per second — but it must be applied early enough that the small shove compounds into a miss-distance of thousands of kilometers by the time the rock reaches Earth's orbit. Days-out detection means deflection is physically impossible; only evacuation remains.
THE TUNGUSKA PRECEDENT
In 1908, an object roughly 50-60 meters across exploded above the Siberian taiga, flattening 2,000 km² of forest. Had it arrived four hours later, Earth's rotation would have placed St. Petersburg under it. No telescope of the era saw it coming; no telescope of today's network would have either.
APOPHIS AND OSIRIS-APEX
Apophis is a 340-meter asteroid that will pass beneath geostationary satellite altitude in April 2029 — visible to the naked eye from Europe and Africa. OSIRIS-APEX is the repurposed Bennu sample-return craft sent to rendezvous with it. Cancelling the mission forfeits the only close-up study of a hazard-class object humans will get this century.
THE NEO SURVEYOR GAP
The single fix for the sunward blind spot is an infrared space telescope at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point — looking back toward Earth, it sees objects glowing in infrared regardless of solar glare. NEO Surveyor, designed for exactly this, has been deferred and rescoped repeatedly since 2005. Each launch slip extends the detection gap by another orbit's worth of close approaches we don't see.