Strong quake and tsunami hits Japan

[paladindythe]

ordnance11 wrote:

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Does NASA have any spare Mars rovers? Those things would be engineered against radiation. Outfit one with an X-Ray/Gamma Ray imager and had it go autonomously inside would do the trick. But that also takes time.

Since NASA has a rather limited budget these years, I imagine not. But I could be wrong. A lot of these ideas boil down to "neat but not worth the cost for a contingency plan".
It's been said (I forget by who) that our current risk management techniques work well until you get to "extremely rare but catastrophic" events. A seperate (financial) example would be the morgage backed security collapse in 2008. We (as a civilization) haven't figured out how much is enough in these situations.