Asteroid Deflection animation for ACURA

An animation to visually illustrate an undergraduate research project that was conducted under Penn State Abington's ACURA program.

Abstract:

As has been widely discussed recently, out planet may become aprobable target for asteroids. We investigate several scenarios proposed to prevent asteroid collisions with Earth. The asteroid 99942 Apophis is considered as a typical representative. Among others, the recent "gravitational tractor" scenario proposed by Lu, E.T. and Love, S.G. in "Gravitational tractor for towing asteroids" (Nature, 438.177 - 2005) is discussed. For a simplistic toy-model we obtain estimates for both the mass of the tractor and the amount of fuel required to tow a potentially dangerous asteroid off-course so as to avoid a collision with the Earth. In addition, we analyze two more scenarios titled "sling-shot" and "bumping", and comment on their relative efficiency compared to the "towing" scenario. Based on the analysis, the bumping scenario looks most promising.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ACURA
• Abington
• Penn
• State
• Asteroid
• Deflection

[lardmonkey21]

everyone knows it always hit paris

[gianpa]

lol why Paris :)