Russia’s plan to save Earth from asteroid
Russian scientists will soon meet in secret to work on a plan for
saving Earth from a possible catastrophic collision with a giant
asteroid in 26 years, the head of Russia’s space agency said Wednesday.
An asteroid. Source:Google |
“We will soon hold a closed meeting of our collegium, the
science-technical council to look at what can be done” to prevent the
asteroid Apophis from slamming into the planet in 2036, Anatoly Perminov
told Voice of Russia radio.
“We are talking about people’s lives,” Perminov was quoted by news
agencies as telling the radio station.
“Better to spend a few hundred million dollars to create a system for
preventing a collision than to wait until it happens and hundreds of
thousands of people are killed,” he said.
The Apophis asteroid measures approximately 350 metres (1,150 feet)
in diameter and RIA Novosti news agency said that if it were to hit
Earth when it passes nearby in 2036 it would create a new desert the
size of France. Perminov said a serious plan to prevent such a
catastrophe would probably be an international project involving
Russian, European, US and Chinese space experts.
Interfax quoted him as saying that one option would be to build a new
“space apparatus” designed solely for the purpose of diverting Apophis
from a collision course with Earth safely.“There won’t be any nuclear
explosions,” Perminov said. “Everything will be done according to the
laws of physics. We will examine all of this.”
In a statement dated from October and posted on its website, the US
space agency NASA said new calculations on the path of Apophis indicated
“a significantly reduced likelihood of a hazardous encounter with Earth
in 2036.”
“Updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate
the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has
dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a-million,” NASA said.
AFP |