Protecting Earth from any big asteroid which may come our manner is difficult. If you break the house rock into items, that would create a hellish rain of shrapnel. However, smashing one thing into an asteroid with out breaking it properly earlier than it nears Earth might change its trajectory, as might the “gravity tractor” strategy of parking one thing large proper subsequent to the asteroid. But these protecting measures solely work if we all know concerning the asteroid far forward of its projected landfall.
Researchers have been engaged on this drawback for many years, however our hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte have some new concepts. In this episode of Dead Planets Society, they’re making an attempt to guard Earth for a change, as an alternative of wrecking it. Alive Planets Society, if you’ll.
To assist save the world, they’re joined by planetary astronomer and asteroid professional Andy Rivkin at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Instead of sending one thing out to the asteroid, they’re interested by the way to save Earth whereas staying comparatively close by. Could we design a internet to catch an asteroid? Or use a tighter mesh materials which may act as a trampoline to chuck the asteroid in direction of Mars?
The thought of an enormous defend orbiting the planet is a tantalising one, not least as a result of any impacts it takes may make a sound and will function an alert system each time the planet was saved. Introducing: the asteroid gong.
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about the way to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare.
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Source: www.newscientist.com