Ok .. for all those asteroid hunters .. the way to avoid a collision with one is currently being debated … and perhaps, there's a role for a couple of solar sails in the ultimately successful strategy, as well..
Research team casts light on asteroid deflection
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Dr. Matloff's research indicates that an asteroid could be diverted by heating its surface to create a jet stream, which would alter its trajectory, causing it to veer off course. In 2007, with a team at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, he investigated methods of deflecting NEOs. The team theorized that a solar collector (SC), which is a two-sail solar sail configured to perform as a concentrator of sunlight, could do the trick. Constructed of sheets of reflective metal less than one-tenth the thickness of a human hair, an SC traveling alongside an NEO for a year would concentrate the sun's rays on the asteroid, burn off part of the surface, and create the jet stream.
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To do that, it is necessary to know how deeply the light would need to penetrate the NEO's surface. "A beam that penetrates too deeply would simply heat an asteroid," explains Dr. Matloff, "but a beam that penetrates just the right amount -- perhaps about a tenth of a millimeter -- would create a steerable jet and achieve the purpose of deflecting the asteroid."
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now here comes the politics ..
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At present," he adds, "a debate is underway between American and Russian space agencies regarding Apophis. The Russians believe that we should schedule a mission to this object probably before the first bypass because Earth-produced gravitational effects during that initial pass could conceivably alter the trajectory and properties of the object. On the other hand, Americans generally believe that while an Apophis impact is very unlikely on either pass, we should conduct experiments on an asteroid that runs no risk of ever threatening our home planet."
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So, I'd like to ask .. what happens if the asteroid isn't made of material that results in a jet ? The success of this approach would seem to be completely dependent on the assumption that a jet could be generated from the surface material, which would be predicted only by a theory about the composition of asteroids and;
I’m not too sure I like the idea of ‘experimenting with Apophis !!
Leave that sucker alone, I say !
Cheers