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Comment by jn

There are a whole range of options, if we have enough warning and invest in the technology[1]. My personal favourite is the gravity tractor:

> One more alternative to explosive deflection is to move the asteroid slowly over a time. Tiny constant thrust accumulates to deviate an object sufficiently from its predicted course. Edward T. Lu and Stanley G. Love have proposed using a large heavy unmanned spacecraft hovering over an asteroid to gravitationally pull the latter into a non-threatening orbit.

And the same technology could be used to actively "capture" asteroids for fun and profit

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance

parent jn 11 years ago

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