AUTOGRAPHS

what measures could be taken against asteroids?

if an asteroid the size of texas was coming toward earth and would collide in thirty years what preventative measures could be taken to avoid total annihilation?

Fortunately there’s only one object the size of Texas and it’s happily minding it’s own business orbiting within the Main Belt.

There are less than 10 objects the size of Manhattan that have perihelia within 1.3 AU of the Sun and none that come particularly close to the Earth.

The biggest threats to us in terms of their destructive power are objects in the 1 – 5 km size range. We know where most of them are now. Nuclear weapons are still a useful option for a deflection attempt. The idea is not to try to blow the object to smithereens but rather to perform a “stand-off” detonation so that the shock-wave provides a directed impulse to the object (provided the object has enough internal strength to respond as a solid object. If you check out the charts in the “Deflection Options” section of the NASA NEO report of March 2007 you’ll see that nuclear weapons provide the greatest capability in terms of momentum change per unit launch mass of any option available to us at present. Kinetic impactors (like the Deep Impact mission to Comet Tempel) provide a non-nuclear option. Gravity tractors, tethered thrusters, differential thermal effects and so on provide small momentum changes and thus require a long time to build up a cumulative effect.

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/report2007.html

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