Neil deGrasse Tyson Outlines a Plan For Saving Earth From Asteroids

dsinc contributes a link to Neil deGrasse Tyson's short piece in Wired on how we could deal with the very real threat of killer asteroids, writing "In 2029 we'll be able to know whether, seven years later, Apophis will miss Earth or slam into the Pacific and create a tsunami that will devastate all the coastlines of the Pacific Rim." From the article: "Saving the planet requires commitment. First we have to catalogue every object whose orbit intersects Earth’s, then task our computers with carrying out the calculations necessary to predict a catastrophic collision hundreds or thousands of orbits into the future. Meanwhile, space missions would have to determine in great detail the structure and chemical composition of killer comets and asteroids."

Comments

Re:When exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

The Colbert interview was awesome. He apparently gave a hard time to James Cameron because the night sky in Titanic was historically inaccurate and when Cameron did the director's cut a while later he asked Tyson to provide the sky.. and he did.

Re:Then a butterfly flaps its wings

[Hatta]

Yes it is. Orbits, unlike the weather, are not chaotic.

An orbit is not chaotic. Solving two orbits (three bodies) is the exact problem that lead to the development of chaos theory.