Remember that time Bruce Willis and the American rock ‘n roll band Aerosmith saved planet Earth by blowing up an asteroid in an act of ultimate human sacrifice? Turns out they were pretty stupid and, instead of nukes, they could have just launched a bunch of white paint at the thing. This new civilization-saving plot comes courtesy of an MIT grad student, Sung Wook Paek, winner of the UN’s 2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition. Which you probably had no idea was underway, no matter that it will no doubt one day save your life and/or the lives of future blue-collar deep-core drillers.The idea takes advantage of solar radiation pressure, which is the principle that any electromagnetic radiation exerts a force on whatever surface it comes across. This is how a solar sail works: photons from the Sun (or wherever) traveling with momentum and energy hit the sail and transfer that momentum to the sail, like wind. The more reflective the surface/sail is, the more force is exerted. So the idea is to make the asteroid more reflective. If you turn it bright white, the force of the paint being launched at the asteroid plus the solar radiation pressure should blow the thing off course. We’re saved!Paek used the asteroid Apophis as his test case. That rock weights a hefty 27-gigatons and will be coming pretty close to Earth two times in the very near future, in 2029 and 2036. The plan will take about five tons of paint, delivered in two rounds, one for the front and one from the back. Once painted, the deflection will take about 20 years. Which is, yeah, a really long time. Paek also suggests the method for delivering substances into the path of the asteroid, slowing it down, or maybe just for painting the thing for the purpose of better tracking.Anyhow, let’s close tagentially by noting the irony of saving a planet from destruction-by-asteroid with a nuclear weapon when that planet has, as of 2011, 5,027 nuclear weapons aiming right back at Earth.Reach this writer michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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