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The B612 Foundation is a private venture dedicated to finding NEOs that will impact the Earth. They used nuclear test monitoring equipment to find the explosions resulting from asteroid impacts.

The trouble with sending a mission (manned or unmanned) to a very small (5 meter class) asteroid in the near future is that we don't know their orbits well enough. At all. Out of 374 very small near Earth asteroids known, exactly 2 have decently determined orbits. The chances of finding a candidate 5 meter asteroid in time to send a mission to it, and having a good enough determination of its orbit to have a mission get to it, is basically nill without a dedicated space telescope such as the B612 Foundations Sentinel mission. So, unless we are willing to wait for an extra 5+ years to build and fly an asteroid finder, that means we have to carve off a piece of a bigger asteroid (more are known, and they tend to have better orbit determinations). As it happens, that is also what the asteroid mining people want NASA to demonstrate, as that fits their view of how asteroid mining will be done, and it will make the asteroid geologists happier as well, so this seems like a win-win all around.

This is a youtube video with history of discoveries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJsUDcSc6hE , http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ - has more up to date info. There are two projects to find almost all asteroids in comining decades http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Synoptic_Survey_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-STARRS Pan STARRS already works to some degree see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ again, Those projects, which work now, are in process of upgrade http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2117062/Nasa-boosts-funds-telescope-team-hunting-dangerous-asteroids.html and then there will be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_Last_Alert_System Europeans too have project to deploy some telescopes http://belissima.aob.rs/Conf2012/Milani_2012.pdf and Russians think of this too. There are also satellites which look for asteroids like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Surveillance_Satellite there are pending projects in Europe http://www.dlr.de/fa/Portaldata/17/Resources/dokumente/abt_17/projekte/Handout_Asteroid_Finder.pdf ( I think it can be resumed later ) and in Russia. There are consents http://b612foundation.org/sentinelmission/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Camera of satellites with infrared telescopes. combined we have: we know almost all big asteroids > 1 km ( 95% now ) , so probability the Earth is hit hard is less, than, say 30 years ago - because we know 95% of big asteroids are already do not hit us in near future ( btw asteroid which caused dino extintion was several km wide, we know maybe 99.9% of all such asteroids now). Currently we have quite a high rate of discovery ( which will be much bigger in 2020s due to planned big asteroid hunting telescopes ) so in 30 years - we have only unknown asteroids few meters wide ( similar to than in Chelyabinsk ), we could be faster if mentioned satellites are launched and they work as expected. But even if we keep just today's rate of discovery the worst we could unexpectedly get - is a destruction of a city, in 30 years even with the current rate ( given planned improvements though ) of discovery we will have very low probability to have even this unexpected event.

Try convincing the public that an asteroid that has a 99% chance of hitting the earth in 150 years is worth spending trillions of dollars on today to launch a probe to deflect it.

No need to spend trillions. Not even billions. Deflection isn't expensive, it would have a lower budget than the air-conditioning budget of the second Iraq war. That's the insanity of the current situation. This is easy. It is cheap. It can be done with current technologies. We're not doing it.

Government is broken, thankfully we have Ed Lu and the B612 foundation.

All the ideas that are brandied about are interesting, but ultimately a waste of time. The problem is much more fundamental that that. We currently do not have the capability of spotting them reliably and effectively, and no government agency is (in reality) working on fixing this rather fundamental problem - this includes NASA, we can not spot these killers by sitting on earth and looking up, we need to get a telescope up in solar orbit to find them efficiently. This means, as the world currently stands, the first warning we will get when an asteroid is on collision course with the earth, is going to be the massive flash generated when it enters the atmosphere, and shortly after, the monumental shaking of the earths crust as it touches down. Deflecting or destroying it at that point becomes rather moot.

Thankfully a private foundation lead by former astronauts and others

has taken it upon it self to fix the issue, and is working with NASA, Space-X and others to launch a detector by 2018 that will actually find most of these buggers, so we can deflect them (easiest option) in time.

to do something about this. Check out the B612 foundation, or watch Ed Lu's TED talk at TEDxNASA

to do something about this. Check out the B612 foundation, or watch Ed Lu's TED talk at TEDxNASA

Currently, the B612 Foundation http://www.b612foundation.org/b612/ is interested in similar stuff but is an NGO. Although they have a much smaller budget (and to some extent do more in the way of lobbying rather than direct research) They have the virtue of having a much better name than "NEOShield." B612 is the name of the asteroid in "The Little Prince".

The group NEOshield from their reports seems to have correctly acknowledged that using a big nuke to just blow up an asteroid is not a good solution. However, it does seem like they aren't very sure what would be the actual best thing to concentrate on.

I'm not really impressed by either. Wolfram made some very good software but then wrote that wretched book which was primarily a mix of either wrong ideas or unoriginal ideas. There was a strong failure to credit the work others had done with cellular automaton. I couldn't tell if that was due to his ignorance or his general self-promotional tendencies.

As to the Lifeboat Foundation I lost minimal trust in them after they got in bed with Pam Geller http://lifeboat.com/ex/boards (yes, that's Pamela "Obama is a Muslim with a Fake Birth Certificate" Geller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Geller#Birther_views). If that weren't enough they've been involved in fear mongering about the LHC http://lifeboat.com/ex/particle.accelerator.shield. There are however other groups that are dealing with exisential risk threats in a serious and useful fashion. The Future of Humanity Institute http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/ which is affiliated with the University of Oxford, and headed by the very bright Nick Bostrom thinks about existential risk issues in general. Meanwhile, there are organizations focusing on specific concerns. For example, the B612 Foundation http://www.b612foundation.org/b612/ is focused on dealing with detecting and dealing with large asteroids. They have the advantage of also having a very clever name. Internet cookie to anyone who can figure out why they are called that without searching.

Well, maybe you should start with http://www-personal.umich.edu/~scheeres/conferences/AIAA-2004_1446.pdf , http://www.b612foundation.org/papers/wpdynamics.pdf etc. Most of the posts on this thread are ignorant and clueless. Don't treat everything you don't understand with scorn.

But there is just one problem is equating this with NASA. NASA has, AFAIK, never done any research into deflecting asteroids and has never implemented or even proposed such a program.

Thought I'd do some checking on this and share with the class:
B612 Foundation

We've been anticipating the conclusion of a contract we issued to Jet Propulsion Laboratory in early 2008, and it's now available. We asked JPL to analyze, in detail, the performance of a transponder equipped gravity tractor (t-GT) in determining the precise orbit of a NEO with which it has rendezvoused, and to evaluate the towing performance of the GT per se.

And elsewhere on their site:

NASA's NEO Report to Congress (see #15 below) has stirred considerable controversy due to both its rejection of Congress' request for a recommended program to support the new Spaceguard Survey goal and it's technically flawed deflection analysis. The analytic work supporting the summary report to Congress is being withheld from public review by NASA despite it having been published as a 3-color glossy "Final Report" and distributed internally.

The sky is falling, really:

The bad news? While this all looks fine on paper, scientists haven't had a chance to try it in practice. And this is where NASA's report was supposed to come in. Congress directed the agency in 2005 to come up with a program, a budget to support it and an array of alternatives for preventing an asteroid impact.

But instead of coming up with a plan and budget to get the job done, the report bluntly stated that "due to current budget constraints, NASA cannot initiate a new program at this time."

Why did the space agency drop the ball? Like all government departments, it fears the dreaded "unfunded mandate." Congress has the habit of directing agencies to do something and then declining to give them the money to do so. In this case, Congress not only directed NASA to provide it with a recommended program but also asked for the estimated budget to support it. It was a left-handed way for the Congress to say to NASA that this is our priority like it or not. But for some reason NASA seems to have opted for a federal form of civil disobedience.

I think this ties in with NASA's, and specifically Administrator Griffin's, emphasis on manned missions over unmanned missions. I hope Obama replaces the man. Because, not having a space mission is a good excuse for the dinosaurs, we can't use that one.

But there is just one problem is equating this with NASA. NASA has, AFAIK, never done any research into deflecting asteroids and has never implemented or even proposed such a program.

Thought I'd do some checking on this and share with the class:
B612 Foundation

We've been anticipating the conclusion of a contract we issued to Jet Propulsion Laboratory in early 2008, and it's now available. We asked JPL to analyze, in detail, the performance of a transponder equipped gravity tractor (t-GT) in determining the precise orbit of a NEO with which it has rendezvoused, and to evaluate the towing performance of the GT per se.

And elsewhere on their site:

NASA's NEO Report to Congress (see #15 below) has stirred considerable controversy due to both its rejection of Congress' request for a recommended program to support the new Spaceguard Survey goal and it's technically flawed deflection analysis. The analytic work supporting the summary report to Congress is being withheld from public review by NASA despite it having been published as a 3-color glossy "Final Report" and distributed internally.

The sky is falling, really:

The bad news? While this all looks fine on paper, scientists haven't had a chance to try it in practice. And this is where NASA's report was supposed to come in. Congress directed the agency in 2005 to come up with a program, a budget to support it and an array of alternatives for preventing an asteroid impact.

But instead of coming up with a plan and budget to get the job done, the report bluntly stated that "due to current budget constraints, NASA cannot initiate a new program at this time."

Why did the space agency drop the ball? Like all government departments, it fears the dreaded "unfunded mandate." Congress has the habit of directing agencies to do something and then declining to give them the money to do so. In this case, Congress not only directed NASA to provide it with a recommended program but also asked for the estimated budget to support it. It was a left-handed way for the Congress to say to NASA that this is our priority like it or not. But for some reason NASA seems to have opted for a federal form of civil disobedience.

I think this ties in with NASA's, and specifically Administrator Griffin's, emphasis on manned missions over unmanned missions. I hope Obama replaces the man. Because, not having a space mission is a good excuse for the dinosaurs, we can't use that one.

The probability of an unacceptable collision in this century is ~2%.

Wow! Two percent is a huge number. I'm not sure how that "unacceptable" relates to these cases, but numbers in the range of whole percentage points are well above my personal something-must-be-done threshold.

The probability of an unacceptable collision in this century is ~2%.

Wow! Two percent is a huge number. I'm not sure how that "unacceptable" relates to these cases, but numbers in the range of whole percentage points are well above my personal something-must-be-done threshold.

"Hauling stuff across the solar system" is much easier than hauling it up to orbit (as long as you don't have any passengers). Space probes have been travelling to the outer planets for the last 30 years. You can use efficient low thrust rockets and take your time, even use some of the payload for fuel, use some orbital mechanics to steal momentum from planets and moons. As for the chemistry, methane and ammonia are carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, we can use them all with 19th C chemistry. It's pretty likely there is lots of water ice there as well.

See the B612 Foundation for one scheme to move asteroids.

Greg Egan has a simple solution to the neutron bombardment problem -- convert everybody into software. I think he underestimates the technical issues...

Before growing far toward being heliocentric, the first biorb will need to begin the defense of Earth against celestial attacks.

Kinetic energy asteroidal weapons are the most likely technology to represent the greatest threat to Earth as a result of the growing solar biorb. Once asteroid mining begins in earnest, as it will once life becomes heliocentric, asteroids can be redirected via carefully planned celestial mechanics. Within a matter of decades, a malicious interest could send a swarm of tiny asteroids toward Earth at speeds comparable to that of the Swift Tuttle comet -- a popular candidate for global disaster scenarios. Since kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity, the important thing is to find small asteroids with the right trajectories. This would most likely be carried out on the basis of a fairly complete atlas of the trajectories of small asteroids, searching for some large number of them that could be manipulated to converge on Earth with maximum relative velocity over a fairly narrow window of time.

The most economic defense will likely be the preemptive survey, cataloging and monitoring of all celestial objects (comets as well as asteroids) large enough to survive high speed passage through Earth's atmostphere with little loss due to ablation. This means the initial prospecting for asteroidal resources will be carried out by Earth shielding entities. It is difficult to second guess the technologies that would be available for this task so far in the future, but candidate technologies are already upon us and surveys are already being done.

Perhaps the most positive aspect of this situation is that when an asteroid is identified as a threat, it is also identified as a particularly attractive source of "fuel" for space transportation. Any asteroid that has a high velocity relative to Earth, or can be easily made to have such a velocity, and which has an orbit that can be made to come near Earth, can be used as reaction mass to navigate the inner solar system. Each time this is done, however, the threat represented by such asteroids diminishes. It's as though someone had discovered a way to burn nuclear fuel in jets without pollution. The bombs would get burned up due to economic demand.

Additional global threats to Earth are most likely decreased by removing technological civilization from its biosphere.

Our conviction is that there is nothing more powerful to convince the public that this audacious challenge can be met than to actually do it

Take a look at the B612 Foundation. They have a solid plan for testing our ability to alter an asteroid's orbit.