LONDON: The British government response to the threat of death from outer space is to be a new information centre, the UK science minister, Lord Sainsbury, announced on Tuesday. Lord Sainsbury more than a year ago received a far-reaching UK government report on the menace of comets and asteroids which, periodically, hit the Earth with the force of a thousand Hiroshimas. “By setting up an information centre, we are helping the UK play a full and prominent role in an area that requires international action,” Lord Sainsbury said.

The information centre on near Earth objects or NEOs -the term for hurtling lumps of metal, ice and rock that present a traffic hazard in space - will be based at the national space centre in Leicester, in the English midlands and should be open by Easter.

It will be backed by $430,000 over three years from UK government funds, and experts based there will analyse the probabilities of a direct hit by any of the hundreds of potentially hazardous objects so far identified. The centre will work with the Natural History Museum in London and a consortium involving the University of Leicester, Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Queen Mary College, London and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

But Tuesday’s announcement still leaves astronomers hoping for more. Two telescopes on La Palma in the Canary islands could be used to track NEOs and one of them will be used for a trial period after February, the announcement says.

Every week, the Earth collides with thousands of tonnes of dust and stones hurtling through space at up to 20 miles a second. Every few years, larger boulders hit the upper atmosphere and burn up. In the past decade, planetary scientists have realised that in the long run, even bigger impacts are inevitable. Every few hundred years something 50 metres or more across explodes with colossal force.

The government’s near Earth objects task force set out 14 recommendations, which included advanced new telescopes dedicated to searching the skies in both hemispheres, and a series of steps to cooperate with international teams to spot potential hazards and dream up ways to deflect them. Privately, astronomers were grumbling about Britain’s claims of a “leading role” in the search for dangerous objects in space. Some pointed out that Britain had so far done almost nothing. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.