Russia to build anti-meteorite shield
RUSSIA: Russian officials on Tuesday proposed ideas ranging from
planting beacon transmitters on asteroids to megaton-sized nuclear
strikes to avert the threat from meteor collisions with the Earth.
Saving the world from asteroid strikes has moved out of the realm of
science fiction in Russia into a political reality after a spectacular
meteor explosion injured over 1,500 people in the Russian Urals in
February.
The meteor strike over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk raised fears
of what could happen if an even larger space body entered the earth’s
atmosphere above an inhabited area. Russian space agency chief Vladimir
Popovkin told a special conference at the Federation Council, the
Russian upper house, that Russia was closely following the asteroid
Apophis that is due to come close to the Earth in 2036.
“We want to put a ‘beacon’ on the asteroid Apophis to ascertain its
exact orbit and work out what further actions to take with respect to
the asteroid’s approach to the Earth in 2036,” he said quoted by Russian
news agencies.
NASA has already said that according to its calculations there is no
danger of the asteroid colliding with the Earth. Popovkin said that an
initial state plan to combat threats from space could appear in Russia
at the end of 2013 but the first real measures would only be adopted no
earlier than 2018-2020.
He did not give details on the cost of the programme, although
Russian news agencies said previous estimates had been around 58 billion
rubles ($1.9 billion).
A senior official from Russia’s nuclear agency Rosatom told the same
conference that taking out an asteroid with a nuclear weapon would
require a bomb with a force of at least one megaton.
“Intercepting an asteroid of a span of more than one kilometre would
need the use of nuclear material of the power of over a megaton,” said
Oleg Shubin, the deputy director of the department of nuclear munitions
experiments at Rosatom.
“This is a separate scientific task that needs to be solved,” he
added Shubin said that it could not be predicted well in advance when
some 50 percent of asteroids and meteors in the tails of comets would be
on a collision course with the earth.
He said while the probability of an asteroid collision was low it
could still happen at any time.
AFP |