<font color="yellow"><br />do you think NASA should commit the funds to place a radio beacon on that asteroid?<br /></font><br />Depends how much such a mission would cost, and what other useful science could be gained by doing so.<br /><br /><font color="yellow"><br />As a known object-of-interest, this will already be getting tracked visually by any number of astronomers. So the purpose of this radio would be... to... allow any asteroidlings that happen to be on there to phone ahead in case they decide to visit Earth?<br /></font><br />As stated in the linked article, the radio beacon allows better orbit determination by a factor of at least 10. The general idea is that the relatively small uncertainty in its state vector now leads to a much greater uncertainty in its state vector after the 2029 swingby. <br /><br />Therefore even if the asteroid were currently on a path that will take it to a collision course after the 2029 swingby, with optical measurements alone we wouldn't be able to say anything more precise than "there's a 1 in 100 chance that it will collide in 2036". This would probably not be enough to justify a deflection mission. After the 2029 swingby we would know for certain that it was going to hit, but by then it's too late to mount a practical deflection mission.<br /><br />On the other hand if we mount a radio beacon in the near future, we can reduce those odds to 1 in 10, i.e. IF it is in fact definitely going to collide then we would be able to say it has a 1 in 10 chance of collision which would be great enough to justify a deflection mission, which if performed early enough would be relatively cheap.<br /><br />Did that make sense? I had to reread the article a couple of times before I understood what they were saying.