[joethedrummer]

Too much Hollywood watchers in the ‘science’ community.

What about preventing a zombie apocalypse too???

[who_would_fardels_bear]

My understanding is that this article is misleading. We may have identified most (but not all) life-on-earth-ending asteroids/comets, but we haven't come close to identifying country and city killer objects.

We are trillions in debt. If we had spent that money more wisely we would already have been well on our way to cataloging a huge chunk of the country and city killing objects as well, and we might also already have deployed a system like HAMMER.

But our government is populated with shortsighted idiots.

[beethovenfan]

So will an asteroid do us in before GoreBull warming?

[Drango]

I saw the movie.

[sit-rep]

“uh oh!! An Asteroid is headed our way!! We’re Doomed!!”

Out walks a man in Black with dark shades on... “Fear not young miss!! It’s HAMMER Time!!” (Que up MC hammers famous tune here!...)

In all seriousness, if a big rock did say collide with another and got deflected our way, I’d be down with a Nuke tipped rocket to deflect it! I mean we do have the tech to do it!! and, space is pretty big, and we’re pretty small. I wouldnt want to die from a space rock!! js...

[mikrofon]

[<1/1,000,000th%]

We’ll be under a mile of ice before we get hit by a large meteor.

[infool7]

I thought most of the NEA’s are naturally drawn into the gravity wells of the larger planets. Wouldn’t it be easier to nudge them the rest of the way?

[beaversmom]

I saw let Mr. Asteroid do his thing. Who are we to interfere? ;)

[G-Bear]

One thing the movie “Armeggedon” got right, is that to destroy a comet or asteroid with a nuclear bomb, you will have to LAND on it, DRILL a hole into the center of the mass, and insert your bomb. Setting a nuke off on the surface of the body, will do little to nothing. (N.B. No atmosphere, no shockwave.) Hitting the body with something fast and heavy, in the right spot, would be the best way to deflect anything.

A better way to dispose of any such troublesome rocks, would be to fly out there, and attach something like the Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Boosters. Probably would need a few smaller steering rockets, as well. Then set a course and fly the thing into the Sun, and permanently eliminate it.

[I want the USA back]

Sure. And each and every one of the fragments of the bomb and of the object will become another hazard, to be tracked.

[fella]

[Bogie]

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/five-years-after-the-chelyabinsk-meteor-nasa-leads-efforts-in-planetary-defense

[reg45]

It’s not a matter of if, but when another asteroid will be on a course to impact the Earth.

[GOPJ]

Yep. just what we need - tons of radioactive material the size of buses and trains, and cities falling on us...

NASA needs to stay with climate change and other silliness and NOT get all of us killed.

[Nifster]

NASA has been proposing versions of this since the early seventies

[Political Junkie Too]

We should simply send a ship to attach some large parachutes to the meteor to slow it down.

Then, we can create a very large cesta to scoop it out of the sky and swoosh it in another direction.

There... problem solved.

-PJ

[b4its2late]

Like nothing could go wrong there.... They’d probably split it in two, and instead of one big one hitting somewhere, two big ones would hit two places....

[ml/nj]

Yeah! Let's let BIG GOVERNMENT save our bacon again!

What a great idea!

BUT just a few questions ...

Are they really thinking of launching megabombs on rockets that might fail and crash back to earth? I mean, what could go wrong?

And are they going to "practice" before they think they have to do this for real? Blowing up an asteroid looks easy in the arcade game, but is it?

And if they a really able to blow apart an asteroid anywhere close to the earth, how many (not so) little pieces will fall here anyway (or because)?

ML/NJ

[jmacusa]

Got news for you folks, stuff hits the Earths atmosphere everyday. A lot of it we don't always see. Unless it's at night and you see the proverbial ‘’shooting stars’’ which is really a piece of iron or carbon not much bigger then a grain of rice to maybe a pebble. And of course the are meteor showers at various times of the year, the Leonid and Perseid showers. We will get slammed into by a big hunk of iron or nickel at some point. A hundred years from now, a thousand, maybe ten thousand years, but it will happen. Heck, we almost bought the farm in 1994 with Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Thank God our cosmic shortstop Jupiter grabbed that bad boy or we'd have been toast. Now comets. They're the real thing to worry about. They're sneaky. They come from in from behind the Sun and you usually aren't aware of them until they're almost on top of us. Those are the guy's you've got to really keep an eye out for.