Did you see the movie Armageddon? It came out in 1998 and was about a crew of deep sea platform oil well drillers. It was quite an exciting movie and I thought that the concept was almost believable. In the movie NASA is concerned over a meteor or asteroid heading for Earth that is big enough to wipe out all life. They hire the best driller with the idea he will teach their astronauts how to drill a deep hole on the approaching meteor in only a few days so they can put a nuke into the hole, thus blowing the rock to pieces. NASA lands up sending the drillers into space to do it themselves. Of course there is a lot more to this movie, but that is the basic plot. When I saw this flick I sort of wondered to myself if this would be possible. Well guess what? NASA must have wondered this also because they are now planning on actually training an astronaut to do exactly this. What got them to think this way, was it the fact that Apophis, a small asteroid is said to be heading this way in 2036? Asteroids are generally larger chunks of rock that come from the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, while meteors are usually small pieces of material broken off from larger pieces.

Left: Asteroid 243 Ida with it's tiny moon Dactyl.
Right: The Tiny Moon Dactyl
Dactyl is only about a mile in diameter while Ida is roughly 32 miles long by about 5 miles wide.

I don't have an answer to this question, but I know this much, they better develop a spaceship that will be capable of doing this task because they officially have nothing now. Of course the problem with saying these things is that we never know what secret projects are out there. One thing is for sure, to land a space craft on a small object that is traveling in excess of 30,000 mph and maybe tumbling, requires a fast and nimble machine. When Chris McKay of NASA was asked about this he replied in part, "The public wants us to have mastered the problem of dealing with asteroids. So being able to have astronauts go out there and sort of poke one with a stick would be scientifically valuable as well as demonstrate human capabilities." In the movie, the idea was to shatter the asteroid or meteor, but this might not be the intention of NASA. A small nudge using an explosive, when it is far enough away, could be enough to move a rock to a new trajectory which would miss the Earth. The problem with shattering these things is that some of the pieces might still hit us and sometimes the pieces are more dangerous than the entire asteroid. Think of a bullet verses a shot gun blast.

What I always found fascinating is the fact that these thing are so powerful when you consider that they don't contain nuclear explosives. It seems to me that if a race was advanced enough and wanted to wipe out people living on another world, they wouldn't use explosives, they would just hit that world with a killer asteroid. The first atomic bomb would be like nothing compared to the power of even a small asteroid. Small is a relative term. Let's say an asteroid about a mile across was heading for Earth. How much power could it generate on a maximum impact angle? I can't be sure but I think it would be in the neighborhood of about 80,000 Megatons. Meteor Crater in Arizona is one of the most studied impact craters on Earth. Scientists have calculated that what caused it is believed to be a small piece of iron mass that broke off from the main body and sort of hit the Earth in a more gentle manner. Even this impact was calculated to be about 2.5 megatons of TNT. To give you a better idea of this much power, try and imagine the force of 150 Hiroshima atom bombs all going off at once. Kinetic energy can be more powerful than even nuclear bombs if the object is big and fast enough.

Putting explosives on asteroids might not be the only way to deflect asteroids from paths that would intercept with the earth. One plan that I have seen talked about was placing mirrors on an asteroid. This would alter the way it absorbs light and slightly alter it's course. If it is far enough away, it could miss it's previous target, US. Some people are already saying that we should use robots, because it would be cheaper. I have to laugh at this because we don't even have a mission planned yet and already it is being shot down. Can you picture this, a robot is sent to an asteroid and it begins to dig, but it's drill gets stuck and we can't get it out or move it. Because we wanted to save money, the Earth is now doomed? When you are talking about saving a planet, is that the time to worry about spending money? Some people really need to get their priorities straight. I don't think that we should send an astronaut to do this, I think we should send an entire crew, in case of problems. This seems too important to me to skimp on anything.

Asteroid and meteor hits were unavoidable in the past. Sure it is true that we have so many other pressing problems on this planet that it is hard to give them a priority, but since we almost have the means of preventing them, we should develop it. One of the big problems is that we don't have the budget to watch the entire sky for these things. We only view a small percentage of the heavens and therefore one could easily get close, before we noticed it. Wouldn't it be nice if we decided, as a race, the human race, to make things better here and not only watch for these asteroids, but solve the hunger problem and throw resources into the disease problem also? Why, for once, can't mankind work on problems that matter instead of trying to kill each other with more and more expensive weapons?

Another thing that I heard that was being worked on at NASA was using a laser to heat up an asteroid and "boil" off material that would propel it to a different course. Using lights or somehow changing the objects reflectivity was also being considered as this would also alter it's course. There are many theories out there on how to move asteroids. One even speaks of erecting solar sails on the object to give it a push. If you really want to be sure that you are going to get the job done, you need people on the spot. The bottom line is that man or woman is more capable and more able to change things should an emergency arise. I personally would trust a human to get the job done right before I ever would trust a robot, which was millions of miles away.