Hank from SciShow gives us the skinny on three plans NASA scientists have come up with to save Earth from an asteroid impact.
Source: SciShow
Featured image: Artist rendering asteroid (Credit: HUB/JHU)
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This all sounds very much like a novel I just read called “THE MYOSHI EFFECT” which is about what happens when a giant asteroid hurtles toward earth, and how they try to destroy it. “THE MYOSHI EFFECT” is a black humor but very factual. Weird how fiction imitates life.
Anybody thought about anchoring a large solar powered gyro at a perpendicular axis on one of the asteroid’s poles relative to the asteroid’s axis of rotation to cause an asteroid up to a few hundred metres to ‘spin down’ in a relatively short order of time? This may not necessarily change its course, but it might be a good first step in allowing for other options more applicable to non-rotating asteroids, such as tethering it to a rocket to pull it off course, or paint balling the sunlit side white to enhance solar radiation pressure with only half the amount of white paint balls necessary, and with all paint balls also impacting on the sunlit side as well. (but cover or stow away the solar panels during the paint balling process!)
But as for really big asteroids in the kilometer rages… we may need to decide between chancing one big strike at a single location or almost guaranteeing many, many smaller but still very devastating strikes at numerous locations including orbiting satellites too, if a Hollywood style approach is used.