SG-1 Monitoring Apophis’ Imminent Attack
Sunday, February 18th, 2007
Astronomers are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036.
“It’s not just Apophis we’re looking at. Every country is at risk. We need a set of general principles to deal with this issue,” Schweickart, a member of the Apollo 9 crew that orbited the moon in March 1969, told an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in San Francisco.
The favoured approach to dealing with a potentially deadly space rock is to dispatch a spacecraft that would use gravity to alter the asteroid’s course so it no longer threatens Earth, said astronaut Ed Lu, a veteran of the
International Space Station.
The so-called Gravity Tractor could maintain a position near the threatening asteroid, exerting a gentle tug that, over time, would deflect the asteroid.
Source: Yahoo! News