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November 10, 2005
A Nice Solution to a Nasty Problem
This post has nothing to do with the Chicken Little movie. Really.
Astronomers have long wondered what to do when an asteroid is detected on a collision course for Earth. Recently it was calculated that the asteroid Apophis may hit Earth in 2036, depending on how Earth's gravity affects its orbit when it comes quite close to us in 2029. The Deep Impact/Armageddon solution is the worst one: even if are successful in blowing up an asteroid, you just get a bunch of fragments of the same mass in generally the same orbit for no net benefit. Using a nuke to deflect an asteroid is less promising now than before since we have discovered that many asteroids are piles of rubble held together by their own gravity instead of solid rock. Other ideas include deflecting it by attaching a rocket to the asteroid or painting it white to use the Yarkovsky Effect. None of these have been satisfactory for one reason or another.
A new and promising idea is to simply park a really heavy spacecraft next to the asteroid and let gravity alter its orbit. Surprisingly this is apparently sufficient to deflect even large asteroids, given 20 years or so. This is one of those ideas that is so simple it's a wonder no one thought of it before!
Posted by at November 10, 2005 03:04 PM
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