NASA has updated its plans to deflect potentially hazardous Earth-bound asteroids — and none of them involve Bruce Willis.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a new report today (June 20) titled the “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan.” The 18-page document outlines the steps that NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will take over the next 10 years to both prevent dangerous asteroids from striking Earth and prepare the country for the potential consequences of such an event.
Officials with NASA, FEMA and the White House discussed the new asteroid-mitigation strategies in a teleconference with the media today. “An asteroid impact is one of the possible scenarios that we must be prepared for,” Leviticus Lewis, chief of FEMA’s National Response Coordination Branch, told reporters during the teleconference, adding that a catastrophic asteroid strike is “a low-probability but high-consequence event” for which “some degree of preparedness is necessary.”
By Hanneke Weitering – Full Story at Love Science
IMO which is the greater risk, a asteroid in a known orbit or a comet in a unknown orbit coming out of the sun and with a very minimal flight time from discovery to impact? A asteroid should give plenty of warning but a comet could have minimal warning between discovery and impact. Considering their somewhat unpredictable orbits and brief warning times compared to a asteroid, I consider a comet a potentially greater risk. Due to lower density and difficulties in applying force to it the difficulty in diverting it might be greater too.