Celestia Forums

Well, here??s my rant for the day: two different norwegian newspapers has picked up on the Association of Space Explorers??proposal and now are shouting about an Earth / Aphopis impact in 2036. One, our biggest - and most conservative - paper (Aftenposten) has, as a headline: "Wants the UN to stop asteroid Aphopis", then goes on to say; "NASA fears
Aphopis may crash into the Earth. Astronauts ands scientists calls upon the UN to stop the huge asteroid Aphopis".

(Not that the ASE proposal isn??t sound. Just that they purposefully mangles it in the paper: instead of discussing what it is about, they just use a snippet to stage a sequel for Bruce Willis). Idiots.

- rthorvald

I say, let it crash.

I never cease to be amazed as to how much the media stretches things. Reading that short news bit, I envisioned a huge ceres-looking rock crashing into the Earth, shattering it, perhaps making another moon. Also included was, yes, Bruice Willis-type scenarios.

Apophis addon: http://celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10790

In reading this, asteroid deflection comes to my mind.

I recall either reading or watching a tv program about a scientist (from Japan I think) who suggests asteroids could be deflected from their dangerous Earth-impacting orbits by the use of "microgravity". The idea being to launch a probe which catches up and follows along with the asteroid at very close distance... and because of the mass of the two objects and the microgravity which would exist, they would each tug at each other and pull closer together... both objects moving in the process... which at some point, the probe would move its position again a bit farther away... the process repeats, and eventually the asteroid would be deflected from its course.

If I run across this again I will post a link if one is available, it was quite interesting.