Jan. 25, 2007 — NASA astronaut and former University of Hawaii solar physicist Edward Lu is calling for a new spacecraft that would divert asteroids on a path to slam into Earth.
The small space tractor, costing between $200 million and $300 million, would hover near an asteroid to exert enough gravitational pull that the space rock's orbit would change and a collision with our planet would be averted, Lu said before a crowd packed into a 300-capacity auditorium at the University of Hawaii-Manoa Monday night.
"We're only trying to get a really tiny change in the velocity of the asteroid to prevent an impact," he said.
Lu was part of a panel including three Hawaii scientists who characterized the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth as rare but deserving of the same level of attention as major earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes.
A report on the appearance appeared on the Honolulu Star-Bulletin Web site on Tuesday.
The asteroid Apophis will pass within about 20,000 miles of Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029.
"It's going to come so close to the Earth in 2029 that its orbit will change and it might change enough so that it comes back and hits us in 2036," said Hawaii planetary astronomer David Tholen, who discovered Apophis.
During the asteroid's next close pass to the sun in 2013 that risk will be assessed in radar surveys, he said.
Objects the size of a grain of sand frequently hit the Earth's atmosphere, appearing as shooting stars in the night sky. But a larger impact could be devastating. Asteroids are blamed for the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and an explosion over Tunguska, Russia, in 1908 that wiped out 60 million trees over a 830-square-mile area.
According to a presentation by university astronomer Robert Jedicke, a Tunguska-size explosion would be able to blast or burn nearly all of Oahu.
