In just six weeks of preliminary observations, the new NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the Chilean Andes—equipped with the largest digital camera ever built—discovered more than 11,000 asteroids never before seen by human beings, the observatory announced this spring. In that short span it produced nearly a million measurements, not only finding the new objects but refining the orbits of more than 80,000 already catalogued, all confirmed by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center—the largest single batch of asteroid discoveries submitted in a year.
The haul included 380 distant trans-Neptunian objects, two of them on orbits stretching nearly 1,000 times the Earth-Sun distance, and 33 newly found near-Earth objects—happily, none are on a collision course. And the observatory is only getting started: the full ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will image the entire southern sky every few nights, has not yet formally begun.
The discovery of near-Earth objects raises an important point. This observatory may one day spot an asteroid headed for us. To identify such a threat in advance is the beginning of the power to turn it aside. Here is an enemy that respects no border and no flag, against which mankind has every reason to unite rather than make war on itself. That idea has a name and a history: the Strategic Defense of Earth, which the LaRouche movement has championed since the fall of 2011, when Russia proposed it to the world as a matter for international scientific collaboration.
It is a fitting emblem of what the human mind is for. The species that reads the collision of black holes and the flicker of the neutrino can also see the asteroid in the dark—and, if it chooses, defend the planet from errant celestial bodies.
