How To Deflect an Asteroid With Today's Technology

Matt_dk writes "Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart is among an international group of people championing the need for the human race to prepare for what will certainly happen one day: an asteroid threat to Earth. Schweickart said the technology is available today to send a mission to an asteroid in an attempt to move it, or change its orbit so that an asteroid that threatens to hit Earth will pass by harmlessly. But what would such a mission entail?"

Comments

Where is the private sector here?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Everyone knows Government only sucks your income through taxation and wastes it. It can not be a solution to anything. They can't even see a banking crisis coming, how are they going to see an asteroid coming? This is the typical muddled liberal thinking that envisages a single provider socialistic detection system.

The Tennessee Fire Brigade has shown the right way. A subscription based detection system. Only the Asteroids that are going to hit the subscriber's home will be detected. If you don't pay the 75$ a year subscription fee, sorry buddy. An asteroid is going to hit your home and we will watch it with glee.

Re:It all depends on detection...

[blair1q]

You're going to deflect an asteroid with distributed computing exactly how?