 Can Earth's gravity affect an asteroid's flight path? Yes it can. It happens all the time. Earth's gravity is actually really really big and anything coming close to us will feel the pull of our gravity and be deflected to some extent from its ordinary path. And it's going to happen in a big way in 2029. There's an asteroid called a Pophis which is going to come so close that it's actually going to be within the orbit of our own satellites, artificial satellites that we've thrown up. It's going to come within I think 17,000 kilometers and we're going to really change the orbit.