Dr. Stan's Plan to Save Earth From Asteroid
"Let's blow it up!" not the answer, says astronaut on spacewalk.
Feb. 11, 2008 — -- Astronaut Stanley Love will be walking in space today to help attach yet another new section of the International Space Station, but he has even bigger plans in mind.He'd like to save the world.
Love, who is aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, has hatched a a plan with his colleague Ed Lu to prevent Earth from getting hit by an asteroid.
"Many methods that people have talked about involve things like nuclear weapons — let's blow it up! Or smash something into [an asteroid] at eight kilometers per second and blow it apart," Love said. "Those methods are a great way of getting kinetic energy into the target, but you are not quite sure what you are going to get after that. Instead of one big rock, you might have a swarm of smaller rocks."
Love's and Lu's plan would send a spacecraft into orbit around any asteroid with Earth in its sights.
"You sidle up next to it, and you just hover there for like a year. Now you need a good long warning time on the asteroid because during your year of hovering, because of the very tiny gravitational pull between the spacecraft and the asteroid, that amount of pull is about the same amount of thrust as gluing a housefly beating its wings, to an asteroid," Love said. "A tiny amount of thrust, but build up over a year, then given 20 years to drift, in that direction, you can turn an asteroid strike into a miss."
Before he saves Earth from an asteroid strike, Love has to help out with a spacewalk. The astronomer-turned-astronaut was scheduled for one spacewalk during STS 122, the current shuttle mission, but because of the unexpected and unexplained illness of his colleague, Hans Schlegel, he will go out into space twice.
Love and astronaut Rex Walheim will prepare the $2 billion European Columbus module for installation on the International Space Station.
It's no big deal, he told ABC News, in an interview before his launch.
"Mainly it is an attitude of mental flexibility. Don't be married to the plan," he said. "You know that at any moment the plan may change and the finely crafted choreography you worked out may not work out that day and you may have to do something else."
