NASA and the European Space Agency have a plan for dealing with potentially dangerous asteroids and no, it doesn’t involve Bruce Willis.
Nor does it include sending an extremely large nuclear warhead and trying to blow it up. For starters that’s incredibly expensive and secondly it would just create about several hundred more asteroids that were all now just as dangerous.
Instead the two space agencies have come up with the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment project.
It’s a mission concept that involves taking a mothership spacecraft, sending it to the asteroid in question and then launching a small, fast-moving projectile in its direction.
The impact would of such force that the team believe it would knock the asteroid off course, avoiding a potentially lethal collision with Earth.
If funded, the team will be targeting not the main asteroid Didymos, but its smaller moon, dislodging its orbit by the merest fraction of a per cent.
It’s a bold idea and one that the space agencies are keen to try out as soon as possible and with a potential candidate turning up in 2020 all eyes are now on the people with the money.