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Russia plans space project to prevent asteroid collision

By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY
Updated

Russia is considering a project to launch a spaceship to try to divert a large asteroid from hitting Earth after 2030, the head of the country's space program said today.

Anatoly Perminov, head of Roscosmos,  tells Voice of Russia radio that  Moscow may invite experts from Europe, the United States and China to join the project aimed at thwarting the menacing asteroid Apophis.

"People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and design a system that would prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people," Perminov says,  according to RIA Novosti news agency.

He says it is his understanding that the 850-foot asteroid "will surely collide with the Earth in the 2030s."

Russia is particularly sensitive to the threat from outer space because of a meteorite that struck a remote region of Siberia in 1908, leveling 80 million trees over an 830-square-mile area in an explosion estimated as equivalent to between 5 and 30 megatons of  TNT.

Perminov offers no hint as to how Russia plans to deal with Apophis, except to say it would not destroy the asteriod.

"No nuclear explosions (will be carried out), everything (will be done) on the basis of the laws of physics," he says.

Astronomers in 2004 initially estimated the chances of Apophis smashing into Earth in its first fly-by in 2029 as high as 1-in-37, the Associated Press reports, but have since lowered the risk.

In October,  NASA dropped the odds of it hitting Earth in 2036 from a 1-in-45,000 to 1-in-250,000 .

It said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact.

Update at 10:45 am ET: A reader correctly points out that the event in Siberia has not been definitively determined to be the result of a meteorite, although most eyewitness accounts refer to explosions and an object or objects falling from the sky. But. officially, the jury is still out.

Science Daily reported earlier this year on the findings of a Cornell University study that was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Says the newspaper:

The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.

Click here to read the article.

For more information o the Tunguska, here are some interesting links :

http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/tungmet.html

http://www-th.bo.infn.it/tunguska/

http://www.tunguskamystery.info/Tunguska_Event

(Posted by Doug Stanglin)

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