From Wired...
At the end of April, scientists & engineers will gather in Spain for the first International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense conference. According to Wired, they’ve got plenty of ideas to throw around, including nukes (Armageddon anyone?), lasers, and even solar sails. Why don’t we just launch a triangular ship equipped with a teleporter up there and let it shoot these rocks into smaller and smaller pieces? I think I’ve seen that somewhere before…
None of these approaches will work unless people see the asteroid in time to plan for it. Under NASA's Near Earth Objects program, six U.S. observatories "search every clear night for these kinds of objects. They are tracked, cataloged and stored," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
More on the conference
http://www.congrex.nl/09c04/I always wonder how many near misses we have that we don't hear about, or if the gov't knows more than they are telling us.
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