3 ms·

The rock that hit our planet 65 million years ago had a diameter of around 10 km. What do you think we may do about that?

• pjkundert 4y ago
  If it’s a few years out — it takes a relatively small amount of thrust to avoid collision.
• Zandikar 4y ago
  The more heads up we have, the less we have to actually do to prevent it. The key factor in having enough of a heads up is actually looking for these things in the first place.
  • vlovich123 4y ago
    Have we made good progress in bringing down our estimates of the orbits for asteroids? In popular press they seem to have large error bars even only half a year out. What’s the confidence level that making a change two years out will have the intended impact instead of sending the asteroid closer to earth?
    • throwaway4aday 4y ago
      Those error bars shrink based on the number of observations you're able to make of the asteroid. Once we get to the point of committing to a redirect mission we would have made sufficient observations to know exactly what the asteroid's trajectory is. After that it's just math.