A $50,000 reward was announced yesterday to whoever can help save the world from a devastating asteroid impact. The Planetary Society promised the prize for the best plan to fit a cosmic missile called Apophis with an "electronic tag" to make sure it stays out of trouble and does not threaten Earth.The 400-yard wide space rock, weighing 25 million tons, will fly so close to us of Friday 13th of April, 2029, that it will pass closer than Sky's TV satellites. No one knows what effect that close pass will have on its orbit and experts are still unable to rule out a collision exactly seven years later. If Apophis passes through a several hundred-yard wide "keyhole" in 2029, it will impact Earth in 2036. Striking the Earth at a speed of 28,000mph, it will explode with the force of 65,000 atom bombs and could wipe out a small country or cause a huge tsunami. Blasting the asteroid with a nuclear missile, as in the movie Armageddon, is not seen as the answer because it could just produce a greater number of smaller rocks to threaten us. Instead, the US-based Planetary Society's Apophis competition seeks designs for a mission to rendezvous with the asteroid - one of thousands of so-called Near Earth Objects - and tag it. Landing a marker will help track the space rock accurately and provide the data needed to decide whether to follow up with another mission to deflect its orbit. Former Apollo astronaut and asteroid campaigner Rusty Schweickart said: "While the odds are very slim that this particular asteroid will hit Earth in 30 years, they are not zero. Apophis and other NEOs represent threats that need to be addressed." Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects said, "With this competition, we hope not only to generate creative thinking about tagging Apophis, but also to stimulate greater awareness of the broader near-Earth object threat." The Planetary Society is conducting the competition in cooperation with groups including Nasa and the European Space Agency. • For more space reading, plus other bargains, check out the Skymania store!  |
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6 comments:
Funny the things you miss while catching up via RSS feeds.
Is it me, or does $50,000 sound way too small?
Shouldn't NASA (or rather Congress) sponsor a prize much larger than that? Say $50 million? (we are talking about a rock hitting Earth here)
It might be enough to get someone going with some ideas! I expect a few are up for the challenge already - possibly including some mining companies! :-)
We can try to break the flying piece into pieces by nuclear bomb.
As a result it will go out of it's orbit and if it comes to us it will come like small particles and burn into air.
The trouble is you would blow it into a heck of a lot of much bigger chunks which would not burn up. Far more sensible to use the intervening period to steer the asteroid onto a course that avoided the Earth!
Paul - what options exist to alter the trajectory of the asteroid that would retain its integrity but still cause it to miss Earth?
Favourite idea at the moment appears to be to to park a large spacecraft alongside the asteroid and use its own gravitational pull to alter the asteroid's path - a so-called gravitational tractor. Of course, you need to get to the asteroid quite a long time in advance!
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