Plan lacks any input from oil field workers

Hollywood has made several movies that center on how humans could destroy
an asteroid or comet that was on a trajectory to hit the Earth. Some
astronomers believe that the chance of an asteroid impact is high
enough to warrant preparation and plans to be readied to prevent such
a catastrophe.

The most credible asteroid threat to the Earth that we know of today is
the Apophis asteroid that was estimated to have a one in 250,000 chance
of striking the Earth. NASA announced in October 2009 that the asteroid
is expected to pass within 18,000 miles of Earth in 2029. NASA later
said that it has "all but ruled out" the chance of the asteroid hitting
the Earth in 2036.

Despite NASA determining that the asteroid will not hit the Earth, Russian
scientists are readying a plan to prevent the potential impact. The
Russian plan reads like something Bruce Willis would be involved with,
yet the plan is surprisingly void of oil field workers. The Russian
researchers are considering a plan to send a spacecraft to bump the
large asteroid to a safer orbit.

Scientist Anatoly Perminov told a Russian radio station Golos Rossii,
"People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million
dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision,
rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands
of people."

He continued saying, "Calculations show that it's possible to create
a special-purpose spacecraft within the time we have, which would help
avoid the collision. The threat of collision can be averted."

Perminov states that the details of the plan still need to be worked out,
but he invited NASA, the ESA, and other space agencies to participate
in the planning. The Guardian reports that space researcher Matt Genge
from the Imperial College London has calculated that a spaceship to
move the asteroid to a different trajectory would only need to have the
approximate mass, acceleration, and thrust of a small car to push the
asteroid out of the path of Earth in 75 days.

Other methods to change the trajectory of an asteroid include mirrors,
light, or paint to change the way the asteroid absorbs heat enough to
shift its direction. These methods would take about 20 years to change
the path of the asteroid.