Do we already have the capability to destroy or deflect incoming asteroids, say, on a week's notice?

Answer 1

It really depends on the size of the asteroid, but most should be pretty easy with the help of computers as long as the materials (missiles, rockets, etc.) have been produced. I'm sure we have a stash of those somewhere...

But in reality, a week's notice is hardly anything at all. We should be able to predict these things much further in advance than that

Answer 2

That would be a negatory. You might be able to deflect an asteroid over a period of several years, but definitely not on a week's notice.

The old "nuclear weapons" option is impractical for several reasons: it would take far more nuclear weaponry than exists today to vaporize an asteroid, we don't even know if we can launch a nuclear missile that far into outer space, and even if we could do both of those things you then have to deal with all that radioactive material falling back to the earth and killing us all.

Answer 3

No we do not. We never will. We would need many years notice to deflect any asteroid big enough to need deflecting. And we cannot even do that yet. Today, if we knew an asteroid was going to hit in 20 years, we wouldn't have any way to deflect it. There are lots of ideas, but no hardware or actual plans. We can only hope that 20 years would be enough time to invent the technology and fly the mission in time to deflect it. If it took 5 years to mount a mission, would 15 years be enough time to deflect it? Maybe. The longer it is until it hits, the smaller the amount of deflection needed. 20 years in advance of a collision you only need to change the speed of the asteroid by a hundredth of a mile per hour to make it miss. But one week before it hits you would need to change its speed by maybe 10 miles per hour. That would take more power than we could produce.

Answer 4

Depends on the mass and material of a meteorite. We get bombarded by them day and night, thousands a day. They usually break up or totally disappear as gas, entering the atmosphere. We could see a real dangerous one (extra large) month ahead. It would be very complicated to calculate, if it would just fly by or really hit the earth head on, since their are so much gravity deflections on its way towards earth. The chance of a rock just the right size for our current technology to deflect, hitting the earth is almost zero, but I wouldn't man a deflection rocket with NASA pilots.

Answer 5

Destroying it would be a bad idea, as all the pieces would still hit us, just all over and less predictably.

I'm pretty sure that right now we don't have a way, but they're working on it.

One idea I recently heard of (wouldn't work on a week's notice, but then, we would have more than a week's notice) would be to send a thing to travel just a bit ahead of it; the thing's gravity would pull it out of the orbit that would collide with us.

Answer 6

On a weeks notice..no way.
Remember you can't "destroy" matter, only deflect it.
Even if we shattered the object, if it had any significant
mass, most of that would still impact us as there simply
wasn't any way to deliver enough energy to deflect it all.
'Nukes` are not unlimited in power and in vacuum would
waste a lot of energy just heating rock without deflecting
it much.

Answer 7

No! We're nowhere close, and it's entirely possible we never will be. Shooting at an asteroid is like trying to hit a particular raindrop with a bow and arrow in a thunderstorm at midnight.

If it gets us, we're got!

As for a week's notice: these objects are just dust flecks on the cosmic scale, coming very fast, and from unpredictable directions. The most likely event is that we will not even see it coming.

So it's a vast project based on a half-vast idea.

Answer 8

A definitive no.

Answer 9

Hell naw.