MOSCOW. (Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti) -...
resulting explosion would change the asteroid"s flight path. Technically speaking, a powerful nuclear explosion can change the orbit of the asteroid several months before it impacts the planet.Russian scientists suggest using the kinetic energy of asteroids in order to destroy them. This can be accomplished by creating an artificial dust cloud in the asteroid"s path. That cloud"s particles would interact with the asteroid surface and gouge craters. The dangerous object would finally disintegrate because the mass of crater particles would be directly proportional to the kinetic energy of colliding bodies. The United States demonstrated this effective method on July 4, 2005, when part of the Deep Impact spacecraft, a copper ball, 65 cm in diameter and weighing 140 kg, hit the comet Tempel 1 with a radius of 3 km and carved a 200m crater.
It would be much harder to build a catapult with the help of robots on the asteroid"s surface for launching rocks into space and
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