The large asteroid Apophis is BAAAACK!
Russia's Roscosmos space agency chief, Antoly Perminov, is advising that the world's space agencies take the Apophis asteriod impact threat seriously, saying "lives are at stake," in a statement to a Russian news agency. "We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would ... prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people."
Perminov is saying that "calculations show that it's possible to create a special purpose spacecraft within the time we have" and "the threat of collision can be averted" if the Russia's , American, European, and Chinese space agencies band together to do build space defense hardware before the 2036 impact date. There is more in this Agence France Presse report, from Pravda with video, and The Guardian.
The impact of Apophis, as suggested by the Russians, would be much larger than the impact at Meteor Crater in Arizona and described as three times the size of the almost three times as large as the Tunguska meteorite that struck Sibera over 100-years ago. Here is more on the the asteriod threat from A.C. Charania's Planetary Defense blog.
America's NASA has plans to defend against the asteriod. The United Nations has been listening to the counsel of former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart on these matters for some time. Congress has taken the matter seriously and funded Near Earth Asteroid searches but not building hardware yet to do it.
Near Earth Objects and Planetary Defence group made a volunteer made video documentary last month about the current issues surrounding defending the Earth from Asteroid and Comet impacts in four parts.
3 comments:
Forget knocking that puppy away. Aim it at the right rock formation and Climate Change is SOLVED.
Ok, there will be a decade where we will all eat long pork but it's worth it for the honor of continuing to drive SUVs and burn coal to power our microwaves.
Plus, think of the money we'll save on air conditioning.
If it'll spur greater cooperation on more ambitious projects between Earth's space programmes I'm all for this initative!
Yes, asteroids are a serious threat, and we should keep an eye on them. But this is a very tiny possibility for the near future. Climate change is a real threat and impacting us now.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2010/01/killer-asteroids.html
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