• Question: what will happen if a meteorite was on a collision course to earth is there some sort of satellite that will vaporize it?

    Asked by kai to Thomas, Rupesh, Hazel, Elliot, Ellen on 17 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Elliot Jokl

      Elliot Jokl answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      At the moment I think we are defenseless, which is a very scary thought! But that kind of event is very rare, so we shouldn’t be too worried about it.

      There are some people who are thinking about ways to stop this kind of collision. Instead of trying to vaporize it (which would take a lot of energy to do!) I think the main tactic that they think about is basically to throw something at the meteor to get it to change direction enough so that it misses the earth. However, I think your idea sounds cooler.

    • Photo: Thomas Biggans

      Thomas Biggans answered on 18 Jun 2016:

      We have an early warning system which tracks the direction and speed of meteoroids so if one started heading towards us we should know about it with time to do something about it.

      As to what to do about it there is the grand plan to use a powerful laser based on earth that would ignite the gases in a meteoroid and make it explode however I don’t think that’s ready yet so we’d probably fire a missile at it and try and blow it up into small pieces or change direction.

      Have you ever seen Armageddon or Deep Impact? They explore the option of sending people to the meteoroid because its just too big to deal with from Earth.

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