Massachusetts Institute of Technology

New Asteroid Impact Prevention Plan: Yellow String?

By Joshua S. Hill

Sunday, September 9, 2007

If you like good movies then you've probably steered yourself well away from Armageddon and Ben Affleck's airport rendition of Leaving on a Jet Plane: and for good reason too. However we simply cannot deny Hollywood's apparent love obsession with holocaustic asteroid impact movies, and their seeming hatred of factual science to back them up.

However in a report that reads as if it was a first draft for the next blockbuster movie, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have announced to the world their plan to save earth from impending doom; if necessary that is.

And while the plan is not necessarily a plan to directly destroy or impair an asteroids path towards collision with earth, it is possibly one of the coolest things you'll ever see!

The plan is described as "the least violent and complex of all", and involves a long strand of tough polymer ribbon (yellow by preference). An un-manned space vehicle would make two passes of the asteroid, stringing along the ribbon in two long and separate lines, attached to the asteroid and held six feet apart.

The purpose of the ribbon is to allow an astronaut to land safely on the asteroid to gather samples, and run diagnostic tests of the asteroid to determine what sort of method would be most appropriate for saving mankind as we know it (or at least the bit of mankind in the general impact vicinity).

For a planet with over 150 impact craters caused by asteroids and their fragments, and scientific theories of mass extinctions as a result, such research and plans are unavoidable, and thank goodness for that.

In fact, NASA is already on track to launch their spacecraft Dawn to meet with asteroids Vesta and Ceres in 2011 and 2015 respectively. NASA is also known to be considering plans to land a man on an asteroid in the future.

This all comes a week after British scientists devised a plan to send a probe to study the asteroid named Apophis which is feared will be diverted in to a planetary collision course with Earth on April 13, 2036. And though the science is sketchy behind this precise calculation, and the likelihood of impact then, later, or not at all, is simply unknown, the plans being readied by space organizations and scientists across the planet are reassuring, if nothing else.

www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/09/06/sciasteroid106.xml