NEOShield project

NEOShield is a new project to defend Earth from Near Earth Objects (NEO). This project has been set up to assess the best way to remove any threats by any interplanetary objects such as asteroids. This project is being lead by the Institute of Planetary Research in Germany.

Approximately once a year an asteroid the size of a car enters our atmosphere, but this burns up as it falls through our atmosphere, causing stunning fireballs in the sky. Every 2000 years an asteroid the size of a football field, this asteroid is wouldn't completely burn up in our atmosphere and it will cause a lot of damage to the local area.

They are going to consider several techniques to lessen the effects of an asteroid impact. A few of them are:

KINETIC IMPACTOR:
This involves a spacecraft that would, not exactly collide with it but change the velocity of the asteroid, such that the asteroid would "arrive early" or "arrive late" therefore causing it to miss the earth.

GRAVITY TRACTOR:
This proposition includes positioning a craft close to the asteroid and then using ion thrusters to keep them from colliding because of the gravitational pull between them. And then, scientists are predicting that because of the gravitational attraction between them the spacecraft will be able to "tow" the asteroid out of its trajectory with Earth.

BLAST DEFLECTION:
This is the classic suggestion for stopping an asteroid collision, this consists of placing an explosive of sorts, usually nuclear, close to or on the surface of an asteroid, the hope is that the explosion would cause it to be deflected away from earth or to be broken in to smaller pieces that burn up in our atmosphere.

This project, in the long term, will be helpful to the existence of humans and will save millions of pounds in damages.