>>> Why does NASA NOT have a ready missile AND mission and warhead - or other device of ANY kind - to detect, track, target, launch, and destroy/move an inbound deadly asteroid?
Cause that will cost several times more then a manned Mars mission. To do anything meaningful with an asteroid you have to intercept it VERY far from Earth past the Mars orbit. That tech is a very long way off.
and btw, warheads aren’t the answer anyway. Robert Duval movies aside, breaking up an asteroid doesn’t stop it from hitting Earth. The same mass just hits in smaller pieces like a shotgun blast. The target rock must be diverted.
Yeah, I’ve heard that it’s better to explode a nuclear weapon at a location that will nudge the asteroid from its path so that it will miss Earth. Since we’re talking interplanetary distances, the asteroid would have to be nudged less than 1 degree to get a clean miss of the Earth (or so I’ve heard, but I don’t claim to be any kind of expert here).