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Quote:Sung Wook Paek, an MIT graduate student, says a spacecraft could fire two rounds of pellets full of white paint powder at an asteroid to cover as much of the rock's surface as possible. The strategy, unveiled Friday (Oct. 26), won the 2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition, sponsored by the United Nations' Space Generation Advisory Council.

The initial force from the paintballs would nudge the asteroid slightly off course, Paek says. And the pale paint job resulting from the splattered pellets would more than double the space rock's sunlight reflectivity. More photons bouncing off the asteroid's surface would enhance solar radiation pressure and bump it further off course.

http://www.space.com/18248-paintballs-as...id=dlvr.it

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**Black H@t**

Secret space program black projects can more than surely handle a asteroid or meteor in space... They just will never tell you that just blast it away before we even know about it... If we get hit they allowed it to happen I believe

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Black H@t Wrote:

Secret space program black projects can more than surely handle a asteroid or meteor in space... They just will never tell you that just blast it away before we even know about it... If we get hit they allowed it to happen I believe

like Reagan's Star Wars missiles?
or were they lasers?

**Ray** · (This post was last modified: 10-27-2012 06:45 AM by Ray.)

The principle is ok, yeah, photons bouncing off..
An asteroid big enough to be a real threat to mankind is going to weigh many millions of tons. At 10 miles per second, it has enormous momentum built up. It wants to stay on course, really hard.
If you could paint it 20 years out there, maybe it would perturb its orbit over time enough to matter. With only a few months notice, this would be such a waste of time it might get us all killed.
Some of these scientists seem like silly asses with degrees from TardTown U.
We need new technology like inter-planetary spaceships to rendezvous with it and some sort of drive we could attach to the asteroid that would, over time, nudge it off course.

Scientists should concentrate on the inter-planetary drive, that would be a good start.