International planetary defense, an ethnographic study

Planetary Defense is the scientific field of study dedicated to the detection and mitigation of a potential threat posed to Earth by a Near Earth Object (NEO), whether an asteroid or a comet. It is a fairly recent scientific field of study. The first Planetary Defense offices were created in the United States in 2017 and at the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2019. Should an impact occur, the Planetary Defense community, an international network of Planetary scientists, is set to work in coordination with international and national emergency response services to deal with such a natural celestial disaster. This dissertation will revolve around the hypothesis that over the past twenty-five years Planetary Defense has morphed from a scientific field dedicated to asteroid detection to a broad managerial international technocratic infrastructure. Considering that such a disaster could have consequences of potentially globally catastrophic proportions, including possibilities for large-scale tsunamis, firestorms, and stratospheric darkening, it is critical that any NEO disaster management and coordination efforts be informed by proven theoretical principles and best practices. On a theoretical level, however, connections have yet to be made between the literature of the sociology of natural disaster management and this newly organized field of Planetary Defense management. This dissertation aims to address this knowledge gap by extracting lessons learned and guidelines from the Sociology of Disaster Management and link them to the field of Planetary Defense management.