MOSCOW. Feb 15 (Interfax) - Russia is unable to trace dangerous space objects due to the lack of modern hardware and a specialized national service, department head at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Astronomy Institute Dr. of Physics and Mathematics Lidia Rykhlova told Interfax on Friday.
"We presented a concept of the Russian space threat protection system to Roscosmos last year and estimated the allocations at 58 billion rubles within a decade, or approximately 5-6 billion rubles per year. But we were told they had no money," she said.
The institute has been trying to prove the need for a specialized national service to scan the circumterrestrial space for hazards but to no avail, Rykhlova said.
"Our astronomy is in a very bad shape. There are simply no telescopes on the Russian territory. The Soviet facilities were erected in the areas with favorable astroclimate (visibility) and after the disintegration of the former Soviet Union they were left behind in the mountains of Central Asian republics, in Armenia," she said.
The only source of information about space objects nearing the Earth is websites of U.S. observatories. The U.S. government created a specialized service in 1998 to watch out for asteroids and comets, the expert said.
"We say that Russia is not the least country and it does not have to depend on U.S. websites. We need a national service, modernization of existent telescopes and construction of two or three large optical telescopes of two meters and more with modern receivers and digital cameras," the astronomer said.
There was nothing surprising about the meteorite in the Chelyabinsk region on Friday, she remarked. "Space objects of 50 meters fall once in every 100 years. This is the period, which has passed since the last major event, Tunguska, happened in 1908," she said.