Can We Deflect Asteroids?

 

 Will an asteroid hurtling through space some day crash into Earth and cause massive damage? The odds are small, but they’re real. Deflecting an incoming asteroid might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but scientists say it can bedone—if the asteroid is detected in time. Given enough prior knowledge, former U.S. astronaut Ed Lu says, governments could launch one or more spacecraft into the threatening asteroid and change its path enough so that it would miss Earth. These “kinetic impactors,” Lu says, could even divert an asteroid the size of the one that brought down the dinosaurs. Lu is one of the co-founders of the B612 Foundation, a non-profit organization that monitors asteroids and other Near Earth Objects (NEO) and studies how to protect Earth from them. Its goal is to fund the building and launch of a space telescope named Sentinel. The telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, will map all the asteroids around Earth. Realizing the threat of an asteroid collision is real, in 2013 the United Nations called for the creation of the International Asteroid Warning Network. The goal is to bring together scientific organizations and nations with active space programs so they can share knowledge about the asteroid threat.