I'm Jorge Ribas, and you're wondering...There's a one in 45,000 chance that in 2029, the Earth is gonna get broadsided by an asteroid named Apophis. But even if a killer rock does invade our personal space, so what? We know what to do. The movie showed us how. Just send up a couple of nukes, a couple of slow-mo action sequences later, and the earth is safe. Right? It's a horrible idea but it may actually be the best one available. Okay, that's not exactly the ringing endorsement I was looking for. Let's say it was targeted at Washington, and instead we cut it in a whole bunch of pieces. But one of those pieces hit Paris. That's gonna be very bad. Okay? My God. What do we do? Okay, so no missiles. But what about some of the other inventive ideas out there? Like using rocket boosters, mirrors, or even a fresh coat of paint to nudge it out of earth's orbit? Well, if you make the asteroid such that it either absorbs a lot of light
on one side, painting it black, for instance...or reflects a lot on the
other side, painting it white, you change the characteristics. Painting
the asteroid undoubtedly will change the orbit. Predicting the changes
in the orbit based on that, is anybody's guess. And that's because no matter
the solution, we're missing some key info about asteroids and other near-earth
objects. But we don't know how coherent, we don't know their content...there
- we don't know a lot about them that we would need to know from, say,
an engineering point of view. The kind of engineering it would take to
come up with a way to move or destroy one. Right now what we've got is
hundreds of thousands of asteroids. And out of those hundreds of thousands,
we've spectrally classified maybe 5,000. Which basically means they've
named them. No one has ever gone to the surface of a number of different
asteroids of different spectral classes and done the real geological characterization.
That's something NASA hopes to change, and there are a number of ongoing
and future missions...that could give us a headstart on how to deal with
any bad days and world destroyers lurking out there. In terms of the science and the engineering, I don't think there's any
doubt that we could have a solution that would...especially with 10 or
20 years worth of warning - that could deflect, break up, or otherwise
even utilize the asteroid. Wait. Blowing it up makes sense to me. Even
moving it. But how would you utilize an asteroid? These things are already
in space. The most expensive thing that you've got in terms of putting
infrastructure into orbit...is getting it off the surface of the Earth.
That means an asteroid made of iron or frozen water suddenly becomes a
resource that can be mined and used for space exploration. It's the exact
same technology that will allow you to do that. If you can get there and
you can deflect it, well, you can put it where you want to. So, you could
put it in orbit around the moon. So, if you can move it, you can use it.