How do you avoid an asteroid ?

Answer 1

We can't avoid them. What we could do is to build a radar early warning system to locate exactly when and where an asteroid will fall. Then maybe we could evacuate these areas.
Another way is to destroy the asteroid using nuclear weapons for example but our technology doesn't allow us to do that yet (we must have a proper spaceship for this task, to put the nukes inside the asteroid, just as in the movie "Armageddon").
Finally, we could build underground shelters to protect humanity from a disastrous hit.

Answer 2

I think you can't avoid it.If you are flying with spaceship I think you can turn to the other side but if it is going to the earth-no. At this time we don't have possibilities to turn our earth to other side :)

Answer 3

I am supposing that by this you mean "How would you go about stopping an asteroid from hitting Earth and thus seriously damaging or even destroying it?” This is actually a reasonably serious problem. Even tho nothing like this has happened for millions of years, it COULD happen, and at just about any time. There have been at least five occasions in the past in which life was very badly affected, a couple of times almost destroyed, so it is no laughing matter when it happens. The last time was about 60 million years ago, and the nuclear winter which followed, along with the discharge of toxic gases from consequent volcanic phenomena are credited with bringing to an end the era of the dinosaurs (or at least greatly contributing to that extinction) Their departure left an ecological niche that was taken over by small mammals, one of which became – you guessed it – US!

I was lucky several years ago to meet the eminent Australian astronomer Dr Duncan Steele, and listen to him speak on the need for a well-funded and thorough “asteroid search” to map out any possible candidate asteroids that might intersect our orbit. He agreed that such collisions were rare, but a good insurance tactic, employed by professional actuaries, is to weigh the smallness of the risk against the colossal consequences of its eventuality. This after all is what you do when you insure against a fire. He pointed out that while the risk for any given year had to be measured as tiny, the potential cost would run into countless trillions of dollars, not to mention the human cost of losing perhaps billions of lives and having civilization blasted back into the Stone Age. In contrast, the actual cost to search for and keep tabs on asteroids would be relatively inexpensive. It does not require the billions necessary to go to Mars, it does not even need more rockets and satellites. It would need only the few millions of dollars necessary to have a team of astronomers to search the heavens for such interlopers, measure their orbits and so on. Such surveys do go on to some extent today, but they need to be given better funding and equipment. Further, the blind spot in such surveys is that the Northern Hemisphere is much better represented in such astral surveys than the Southern. Seeing that an asteroid visible only from Southern skies would be just as devastating as ones from the North, the grid should be souped up here (in Australia) and in South America and the Pacific. Modest and reasonable requests. And of course, such surveys would also be providing data on all sorts of other astronomical phenomena as a by-product anyway.

What would you do if you located an asteroid that was headed RIGHT THIS WAY??!!!! Well, if you had been lax and indulgent and been funding SETI and such at the expense of funding Asteroid research, and now you find that the Mother of all Asteroids is going to splatter us in about a week, well, then not much. I would suggest joining the Mormons and having a quick trip to Bermuda. If however, humans had been prudent enough to invest what is really small change in a good global on-going asteroid-hunting project and you had, say, six months or a year’s notice, you could really start doing something to save our collective butts.

Oddly, the Bruce Willis / George Bush / Roger Ramjet approach of take a proton Pill and NUKE THE MOTHER with everything we got and then some, would probably not work. No, strange to say, the SHOCK AND AWE strategy would not be any more successful in the Heavens than it has on Earth. Thus, the idea of intercepting it with nuclear bombs would not work. Why not? Well you have to factor in that an asteroid capable of doing serious damage might weigh a couple of million tons and more, and be speeding at thousands of miles A SECOND. That’s an enormous amount of momentum. Even if your nuclear bomb split it into pieces it is quite probable that those pieces will continue to go forward in almost the same direction as before. For example you might remember all those films where a roadblock has been set up and a huge juggernaut of a truck simply ploughs thru all the obstacles like they were hardly there. That’s because the mass of the truck combined with its speed is likely to keep it heading in the same direction even if it causes a dozen police cars blocking its path to soar into the sky and dutifully burst into flames like skyrockets. So even if the nukes broke up our asteroid, the pieces could keep coming on, and perhaps, being split up the way they are, they might actually be more dangerous than before, because the chances that at least one of them will hit has been increased. This is not just idle speculation either. One of the less-publicised aspects of the Patriot Anti-Missile program deployed outside Tel Aviv in the first Gulf War of 1991, was that, yes, it did manage to intercept some of the Scud missiles that Saddam had fired from Iraq. But most of those missiles were going to miss anyway, what with Scud being a dinosaur technology. Being intercepted by Patriot that old clunker of a Scud missile became hundreds of small flaming molten iron projectiles, which could easily have been more injurious than the original rocket.

Another factor to consider is that it turns out that asteroids are considerably less dense and monolithic than it turns out. They are not like a giant floating lump of granite, more like the contents of a very big gravel truck. This is not good. It means that the object is capable of ABSORBING a lot of energy from an external impact and retaining its shape. You can see this if you imagine the difference between hitting a lump of rock with a sledgehammer as opposed to so hitting a pile of gravel. You are more likely to get a better effect with the lump than you are with the pile.

So the general consensus seems to be that the “softly softly” approach could be the best way. This might involve sending up a rocket which can, over a long period of time, blow propellant at the asteroid from one side. This would cause a very small deviation in its path. But you would only NEED a very small deviation. Sustained pressure on one side of the asteroid in this way would build up a cumulative effect that would be large enough so that when, in a year’s time or so, the asteroid had finally got to within striking range of Earth, it would miss by a small margin rather than hitting us. But for that, you REALLY do need plenty of notice. Otherwise, it’s sit down in a safe place, put your head between your legs, and kiss your butt goodbye.

Answer 4

Eat a high fiber diet.

Answer 5

we can't avoid astroids

Answer 6

close your eyes :o)

Answer 7

you dont go infront of it!!!