Aerospace engineer thinks up way of deflecting asteroids

Washington, April 17 (IANS) David French may be the guy who saves the world from an asteroid when it comes hurtling down from space.

“Using a tether somewhere between 1,000 km to 100,000 km to divert an asteroid sounds extreme but compare it to other schemes. They are all pretty far out. Other schemes include a call for painting the asteroids in order to alter how light may influence their orbit, a plan that would guide a second asteroid into the threatening one, and of course there are nukes,” he said.

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Now correct me if I'm wrong, but the old 'paint it white, or bomb it' plan for deflecting an asteroid is YEARS old....in all that time, have they only come up with ONE measly other option????? You'd think they'd have a team of experts spewing out ingeneous ideas every day of the week!!!!

I've always wondered why we couldn't launch a remote control engine that will attach to the object and nudge it off course.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of these killer asteroids that narrowly miss the Earth aren't detected until they've already gone by. There are so many of them we can't keep track of all of them, so one may be on the way right now and we won't see it coming until it's already in our atmosphere. We don't have a good track record of spotting these things early enough to make a difference even if we did have the technology to destroy them or deflect them.