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NASA Outlines Asteroid Deflection Program
An anonymous reader submitted a link to an International Herald Tribune story about NASA's answer to the movie 'Armageddon'. Specifically, they've outlined a plan to deflect a planet-killer asteroid. "In 1998, Congress gave NASA's Spaceguard Survey program a mandate of 'discovering, tracking, cataloging and characterizing' 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than one kilometer (3,200 feet) wide by 2008. An object that size would probably destroy civilization. The consensus at the conference was that the initial survey is doing fairly well although it will probably not quite meet the 2008 goal." With this tracking system in place, scientists are hopeful an intervention could be staged before any grim choices have to be made. Assuming they have the money and manpower needed for the effort, NASA has actually outlined a pair of procedures that dove-tail with each other: "First we would deflect the asteroid with kinetic impact from a missile (that is, running into it); then we would use the slight pull of a 'gravity tractor' -- a satellite that would hover near the asteroid -- to fine-tune its new trajectory to our liking. (In the case of an extremely large object, probably one in 100, the missile might have to contain a nuclear warhead.) To be effective, however, such missions would have to be launched 15 or even 30 years before a calculated impact."
How crazy do you have to be to think that an asteroid is a real threat for humankind? *shakes head*
Well, unless you've seen any dinosaurs lately, an extinction event has happened in the Earth's past at least once. Yeah, the chances of it happening again in our lifetime are infinitesimally small, but the consequences of *not* deflecting an asteroid if it comes our way are especially dire. I, for one, am all for the "just in case" planning in this regard.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
There are many other things (wars, diseases, maybe terrorism) which are much more likely to destroy civilization as we know it.
Considering how well money has been spent on projects like "the war to end all wars" and the "war on terrorism", I would say that a project to deflect asteroids looks very wise in comparison. Whereas, I agree, the research on diseases is an important and underfunded domain (yes, I'll consider it underfunded as long as I have a life expectancy inferior to two centuries). Anyway, it's "just" a few millions dollars spent on watching pebbles in the sky, an activity that could be useful and do no harm, and it goes back into the economy anyway...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Without doing any calculation, I presume there's an optimal distance away which is somewhere around a quarter or a third of the asteroid's diameter. Presumably someone would simulate this properly before launching a nuke all the way to an asteroid.