That’s the (rather unscientific) advice to Congress from NASA chief Charles Bolden, who basically says that if a large asteroid heads towards a big US city–as it recently did in Russia–there’s not much else we can do. He told them, "From the information we have, we don’t know of an asteroid that will threaten the population of the United States. But if it’s coming in three weeks, pray."
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It’s like a video game in the sky: A joint mission between Europe and the US plans to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid in order to prove that incoming space rocks can be knocked off their paths before they collide with Earth.
The Asteroid impact and Deflection Assessment mission (AIDA) will intercept the asteroid Didymos in 2022, when it is about 6.5 million miles from impacting us. Didymos is a binary system, with an 800 meter wide asteroid and a smaller 150 meter space rock orbiting each other. It does not pose a threat in the foreseeable future, so it’s OK if we miss.
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Will life on Mars go the way of the dinosaurs before we have a chance to discover it? Incoming Comet C213/A1, discovered on January 1st, is expected by some astronomers to pass within 28,000 miles of Marsin 2014. But cometary trajectories change, and an impact is not impossible, although NASA estimates that the object will pass Mars at a distance more like 80,000 miles.
Should it hit the planet, it will cause a spectacular explosion, releasing the equivalent energy of billion megatons of TNT. This is roughly the size of the blast that climaxed the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
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An aerospace and physics researcher has a plan to deflect a killer asteroid by using paint. The idea may sound crazy, but he’s working with NASA on the project.
Dave Hyland thinks that one possible way to avert an asteroid collision with Earth is by using a process called “tribocharging powder dispensing” to spread a thin layer of paint on an approaching asteroid, such as the one named DA14 that came within 17,000 miles on February 15.
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