Date published: 2008/02/26
The BBC says:
A US team has won a $50,000 (£25,000) competition to design a spacecraft to rendezvous with and track the path of an asteroid which may threaten Earth.
The winning entry, led by SpaceWorks Engineering, will shadow asteroid Apophis for 300 days.
The measurements it takes will be used to refine what is known about the orbit of this 300m-wide space rock.
Apophis will make a close pass of Earth in 2029 and there is a small but real possibility it could hit in 2036.
The competition was organised by the Planetary Society, a space advocacy group with its headquarters in Pasadena, California.
The idea behind the project was to "tag" Apophis and thereby plot its orbit accurately enough to determine whether it will strike our planet.
The contestants were tasked with designing a mission which would launch, rendezvous and collect enough data in time for governments to decide in 2017 whether or not to mount a mission to deflect the asteroid off its current course.
...
Planetary defence advocates say it is imperative to collect data on the asteroid's path as soon as possible to know whether it will strike our planet or not.If it is found to be on a collision course, one option governments have is to mount a deflection mission. This would involve launching a spacecraft able to give the asteroid a nudge to change its orbit.
Leaving this too long would make it impossible to build a spacecraft powerful enough to move its out of harm's way.
Ideally, say advocates of such a mission, Apophis' orbit would need to be changed before 2025 to be sure it misses the Earth.
Hey, why not. But would anyone trust these scientists enough to risk giving the asteroid a "nudge"? It would be the supreme irony if the "nudge" was what finally pushed it into an eventual direct hit of the Earth. (The orbit is probably easy enough to get right, since it's just Newton's equations. The problem is more with the "nudge".)
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