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Dwayne Rabideau

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Asteroid DA-14... A lost opportunity??

The Asteroid DA-14 is one that is about to pass within 17000 miles from earth. In the movie world, SCI-FI has opened up many scenarios in which to ponder.
Movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon showed the general public the risks of having a foreign body slamming into the earth.
With the decommissioning of nuclear warheads, did we give up a real life opportunity to mimic what we saw at the hands of Bruce Willis or Robert Duval??
Could it have been as simple as this??

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  • Don Anderson 20+

    • +1
    Feb 15 2013: It was a missed opportunity, but not one as movies would have you think.

    As in Phil Plait TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/phil_plait_how_to_defend_earth_from_asteroids.html they could have launched a satellite to guide it. The earth really needs to have a few asteroid guiding satellites ready for launch, so we don’t have a really bad day.
    It would have taken years but DA-14 could have been slowed and put into orbit around the moon or between earth and mars to be a future space station half way point.

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