If the economy isn't depressing enough for you then watch this asteroid impact video that is making its way around the Internet. A large enough asteroid impact could be devastating to our planet. NEAT is the NASA division that attempts to track Near-Earth asteroids that could potentially cause great harm to the Earth and the human race.
The Associated Press is reporting that NASA does not have the $1 billion in its budget to track down killer asteroids that might cause us harm.
NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done.
The cost to find at least 90 percent of the 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets by 2020 would be about $1 billion, according to a report NASA will release later this week. The report was previewed Monday at a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington.
Congress in 2005 asked NASA to come up with a plan to track most killer asteroids and propose how to deflect the potentially catastrophic ones.
The article says NASA already tracks large objects (at least 3,300 feet in diameter) that might get close enough to Earth to cause us problems. It is the smaller ones - which could still be very destructive -- that NASA can't afford to track. If funding can't be found than we will never know how many more asteroids there are out there like the 390-meter wide Apophis that are possibly going to hit us.
The Guardianreports that NASA is drawing up plans to land an astronaut on an asteroid -- the same thing Bruce Willis did in the film Armageddon.
To save the day, Nasa now plans to go where only Bruce Willis has gone before. The US space agency is drawing up plans to land an astronaut on an asteroid hurtling through space at more than 30,000 mph. It wants to know whether humans could master techniques needed to deflect such a doomsday object when it is eventually identified. The proposals are at an early stage, and a spacecraft needed just to send an astronaut that far into space exists only on the drawing board, but they are deadly serious. A smallish asteroid called Apophis has already been identified as a possible threat to Earth in 2036.
Chris McKay of the Nasa Johnson Space Centre in Houston told the website Space.com: "There's a lot of public resonance with the notion that Nasa ought to be doing something about killer asteroids ... to be able to send serious equipment to an asteroid.
"The public wants us to have mastered the problem of dealing with asteroids. So being able to have astronauts go out there and sort of poke one with a stick would be scientifically valuable as well as demonstrate human capabilities."
A 1bn tonne asteroid just 1km across striking the Earth at a 45 degree angle could generate the equivalent of a 50,000 megatonne thermonuclear explosion. Attempting to break it up with an atomic warhead might only generate thousands of smaller objects on a similar course, which could have time to reform. Scientists agree the best approach, given enough warning, would be to gently nudge the object into a safer orbit.
Learning how to nudge the incoming asteroid away is very important because experts believe it is inevitable that we will face this frightening scenario.
A near miss, when asteroid QW7 came within 4m km of Earth in September 2000, led Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik to declare: "It's not a case of if we will be hit, it is a question of when. Each of us is 750 times more likely to be killed by an asteroid than to win this weekend's lottery."
Astronomers are constantly monitoring for potential asteroid threats. They have already spotted one potential threat called Apophis. It would serve us well to have a working plan in place years before Apophis or a similar asteroid gets close enough to start making everyone nervous.
Scientists Concerned About Possible Asteroid Hit in 2036
The Guardian reports that scientists are concerned that a 390-meter wide asteroid named Apophis has an outside chance of hitting Earth and causing devastation in 2036.
Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere.
And, scientists insist, there is actually very little time left to decide. At a recent meeting of experts in near-Earth objects (NEOs) in London, scientists said it could take decades to design, test and build the required technology to deflect the asteroid. Monica Grady, an expert in meteorites at the Open University, said: "It's a question of when, not if, a near Earth object collides with Earth. Many of the smaller objects break up when they reach the Earth's atmosphere and have no impact. However, a NEO larger than 1km [wide] will collide with Earth every few hundred thousand years and a NEO larger than 6km, which could cause mass extinction, will collide with Earth every hundred million years. We are overdue for a big one."
Apophis had been intermittently tracked since its discovery in June last year but, in December, it started causing serious concern. Projecting the orbit of the asteroid into the future, astronomers had calculated that the odds of it hitting the Earth in 2029 were alarming. As more observations came in, the odds got higher.
30 years is not as long as it sounds when technology is considered -- because our technology is not advanced enough to deal with asteroids we actually don't have much time to prepare. The Earth Impact Risk Summary for Apophis can be found here. The current impact probability shows just a 1 in 5,560 chance the asteroid will hit Earth so the odds are in our favor. But it is better to be safe than sorry and it is time to come up with a strategy to remove the risk of Earth being wiped out by an asteroid.
Apophis is aptly named. The Guardian said Apophis was the "ancient spirit of evil and destruction" in Egyptian mythology. TourEgypt.net has more about Apophis.
Apophis (Egyptian Apep) was the great adversary of the sun god, Re. and was the very embodiment of the powers of dissolution, darkness and non-being. Hence, he was a sort of void or "black hole" forcing those he swallowed into that non-existence which the Egyptians feared so greatly.
New Scientist reports that a new strategy developed by NASA astronaut Edward Lu to stop asteroids involves placing a massive object, likely a huge spaceship, near the incoming asteroid and use gravity to pull the object out of an orbit that will hit planet Earth.
Lu’s team finally realised that the spacecraft might not need to land at all. Placing a heavy enough object near the asteroid for long enough could produce sufficient gravitational tug to change its orbit.
For a 200-metre-wide asteroid, the spacecraft would need to weigh about 20 tonnes and lurk 50 metres from its target for about a year to change its velocity enough to knock it off course.
"This is hands down the best idea I have seen," says Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "This will work, but you need to put a large enough spacecraft out there at the right time."
The article also said that Lu thinks creating spacecraft that are large enough is perfectly feasible. Obviously you would need to have construction plans in place well ahead of the asteroid's impact date which is why discovering asteroids that might strike Earth is such an important field of astronomy.
The Guardian 
The Guardian 
