In April of 2017, in the middle of another late-night of insomnia funk, I read a post on Reddit that caught my interest. The post was from a person who claimed to be a member of a team at NASA that had been working on a mission to deflect a very specific asteroid, and was leaking information relating to the mission because he, or she was upset and very worried about the Trump administration’s cancellation of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission. Within minutes of the post appearing, it was deleted. Luckily, before it disappeared I did some searching on Google to try and confirm some of the claims, but nothing came up and I abandoned my effort thinking it was a hoax.
Fast-forward to Thanksgiving break and my kids and I are watching “The Martian.” As I watched, I recalled the post on Reddit and wondered… What if I submitted a FOIA request to NASA? I began to comb through my Google search history and found my searches from April which gave me the name of the report and the date: “IAC-05-D2.8-A5.4.1 — Trajectory and Threat Analysis of 1983 SA — October 18, 1983.” I found NASA’s FOIA request site and sent an email request with all the required information.
I never expected to hear back. At a minimum, I thought I might be told that no such report existed. To my utter astonishment, on Monday, January 22nd I received a large, heavy envelope with a copy of the 58-page report from NASA, as well as two other ancillary reports. Across the top of each page of the reports are the words “Top Secret” and just below, a stamp that reads “DECLASSIFIED 01-JAN-2013.”
There are no redactions.
https://medium.com/%40BadHombre/the-asteroid-no-one-is-talking-about-a1110aaaf984
Fair warning: The author reveals updated information later that indicates this particular asteroid has been reevaluated as not a threat, and then veers off into an argument by analogy about the impact of global warming. Still, it is an interesting read.
