Asteroid diverted from hitting the earth?

Question

I finished wathcing the movie, Armageddon, where they had to land on the asteroid and plant a nuke 800 feet inorder to blow it up. Why can't we send rockets up to a asteroid, fire grappling hooks and fire the rockets to point to the sun? Slowly changing the course of the asteroid?

Answer 1

Not so silly, actually.

One of the techniques they are seriously looking at is to fire Nukes adjacent to the asteroid rather than in it. The idea is to nudge it slightly into a different orbit.

If this is done early enough, then even a very slight change in the orbit will cause it to miss Earth by thousands of miles.

NASA has an ongoing project to find and plot all near-Earth asteroids larger than 1 km across by the end of 2008. having done this, theoritically there will be nothing that's going to catch us out (except comets, see below).

But the 1km size is set at the size at which an impactor could theoretically end civilisation. There are tens of times more asteroids in the 50-500 meter range that they will not find that can potentially destroy whole regions.

Then also, there are wayward comets that come into the Solar System from time to time. They are undetectable, and unpredictable. However, they are so few and far between that the chances of one hitting us are many millions to one.

But getting back to asteroids. If we don't find a way to prevent one hitting Earth, it will happen, that's for sure.

Answer 2

There are so many lovely ideas that people come up with to save Earth from being hit by asteroids. It's all science fiction though.

The big problem is that at the moment it is beyond our technological capability. For one we don't have the equipment standing by ready to blast off and do the job. Then of course is the fact that to plan and execute a space mission takes years of preparation. I heard recently that to carry out such a mission as that seen in Armageddon would need 7 years advance warning! Bummer huh?

There are institutions such as LINEAR and NEAT whose task is to find new comets and asteroids that might possibly hit the Earth and all the time they are discovering new objects. Occasionally one sneaks under the radar though. Only a couple of weeks ago a rather large asteroid just missed the Earth. They only discovered it less than a month before it made it's pass.

Answer 3

The closest asteroid is the asteroid belt which is between Mars and Jupiter. It would take at least two years and millions of dollars to get there, besides the staff of hooks and rockets.
NASA space budget doesn't allow to get to Mars, plus all the rest. So all about budget and money.
Bush puts more money to weapons than to NASA. So they can only do with the cash they have got. They had to cut short the latest mission to Pluto because they didn't have enough money. Also there are many other missions that they planned during Clinton government, but Bush came in and five or more missions have been cancelled. They are going to use an old space engines' shuttle to make a moon lander. So, they have to recycle old stuff.

Answer 4

There are plans to do something like this... more specifically, to land a space craft on an asteroid and fire jets to "push" the asteroid off a collision course with Earth. One challenge is to find the asteroid in time to ready a rocket to launch... there are other challenges, but your idea is not completely far-fetched.

Answer 5

There are serious people considering ways to do something like that. But until we can identify an asteroid that really is on a collision course with Earth, they won't get much funding to build actual hardware. There is funding for observatories to search for asteroids and many thousands have been discovered in the last few years as a result, but so far, none is on a collision course with Earth.

Answer 6

Well first off, the Armageddon movie is nothing but horrible physics and astronomy. check out http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/armpitageddon.html

2nd of all, NASA had a plan to do that, but sending nukes into space is to dangerous. They would send the nukes or explosives onto the astroid on one side and blow them all up, that would change the course of the astriod just enought to not hit Earth. But nothing about sending astroids to the Sun.

Answer 7

rockets aren't that strong, think of rockets trying to turn the earth.. it wouldn't work. asteroids, bear in mind, are freaking huge!

Another problem would be gravity... even if the rockets could change the course of the asteroid, the earth's gravity would still probably pull it in and cause an impact.

Answer 8

asteroids range in size from golf ball size to ones the size of some continents... the ones that pose threats are obviously the bigger ones.. with an asteroid the size the state of Texas traveling at thousands of miles per hour it would be hard to change its trajectory.. you would need rockets that must produce massive amounts of thrust equal to the size of the asteroid to move it.. that kind of power we dont have yet

Answer 9

You watch to many movies. Suggest Discovery Channel

Answer 10

I will just use my psychokinetic ability to deflect the nest earthbreaker asteroid that comes our way. If you pay me $10million up front. (If I fail, sue me. ;-)