Within decades, the world’s leaders may be faced with a dilemma: what do about an incoming object. Few experts are giving this much thought, according to NASA astronomer David Morrison the number would roughly staff a couple of shifts at McDonalds, he says Ed Lu, the former astronaut, is one of them.
He is working on a plan that employs a spaceship to deflect asteroids headed for earth. We were originally thinking about how you would land on an asteroid and push it, he says. But that doesn’t work well. If the surface isn’t solid, you have trouble landing or keeping anything on it. Moreover, asteroids are always rotating. If you’re pushing and the thing is rotating, the pushing just cancels out, Lu says.