TheWorldJournal.com

Who Wants the Armageddon?
By Artashes Toumanov, TheWorldJournal.com

"Armageddon", "Deep Impact", "Mission to Mars"… Hollywood has accepted a new kind of fetish - Armageddon movies. Directors have started to entertain us with movies about asteroids and space. So, let us ask - why is that? It's seems like the end of the world is near. But no. The Journal can assure you in this.

We asked Paul Grube (amateur astronomer for over 40 years), the professor in this area, to help us to understand "what if..."

In spite of the fact that the Earth is still just a planet in the Universe, recent observational studies show no close approach. In other words, there is no impact approach of any of the known comets and asteroids that can cross Earth's orbit in the near future.

A comet could be seen up to a year or two in advance. An asteroid might be harder to see in advance, especially if it is small like those seen in the movies. Still, the means of finding these objects does exist - if people will use them. Unfortunately, we do not seem to have any ships or people ready to tackle such a body should it end up on a collision course. Such schemes seem to exist on paper only, not in reality - unless our governments are keeping such ships and people secret.

It would be relatively easy, for example, to attach an ion motor or a weak rocket motor to an asteroid that is quite a distance from earth. Simply turning it on for a period of weeks or months would forever deflect the asteroid so that it could never impact the Earth. The technology exists, but we have never done it. It would certainly not be as easy as it looks on paper, so we should be out there practicing on harmless asteroids so that if a future asteroid shows up on collision course, we could go out into space and change its course.

To sum up, we can detect these things, and we can deflect them away from a collision course, but we've got to spend some time and money to do both and we need to practice this art in space. It could be done; but as far as I know, no one is practicing!?

© October 7, 2000

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