'Nuke earthbound asteroid'
2002-07-25 09:20
Sydney - An asteroid that could hit Earth in 17 years should be blown from its present trajectory with a nuclear weapon, an Australian astronomer said on Thursday.
Vince Ford, an astronomer at the government-run Stromlo
Observatory near Canberra, warned that without action the asteroid could plummet to Earth, causing tidal waves and massive
destruction.
"That'd be the way to do it," Dr Ford told Australia's Seven
Network.
"Forget sending Bruce Willis up to drill into it and blow it
into small bits - that's unlikely to work. No, what you do is put a nuke alongside the thing and blow it sideways."
Scientists are uncertain whether the asteroid, four kilometres
across and known by the United States' space agency Nasa as 2002 NT7, will head to Earth in 2019.
Nasa said it was too early to tell whether the remote
possibility would become more likely.
Dr Ford's solution is similar to the plot of the film
Armageddon in which Bruce Willis starred as an oil driller who landed on an earthbound asteroid the size of Texas to set nuclear charges to blow it up.
The plot of Armaggedon had an 18-day time frame, but there is much more time to deal with 2002 NT7, Dr Ford said.
"You've got 17 years to think of how to do it, but basically what you do is rendezvous with it, blow something alongside it, kick it off onto a different track," he said. - Sapa/DPA
- SAPA