page_title: Asteroid impact avoidance
section_title: Other proposals
hierarchical_section_title: Asteroid impact avoidance / Collision avoidance strategies / Other proposals
caption_attribution_description: English: An artist's concept of a space sail. Čeština: Studie sluneční plachetnice.
context_page_description: Asteroid impact avoidance comprises a number of methods by which near-Earth objects could be diverted, preventing destructive impact events. A sufficiently large impact by an asteroid or other NEOs would cause, depending on its impact location, massive tsunamis or multiple firestorms, and an impact winter caused by the sunlight-blocking effect of placing large quantities of pulverized rock dust, and other debris, into the stratosphere.
  A collision 66 million years ago between the Earth and an object approximately 10 kilometres wide is thought to have produced the Chicxulub crater and the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, widely held responsible for the extinction of most dinosaurs.
  While the chances of a major collision are low in the near term, there is a certainty that one will happen eventually unless defensive measures are taken. Astronomical events—such as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts on Jupiter and the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, along with the growing number of objects on the Sentry Risk Table—have drawn renewed attention to such threats.
  In 2016, a NASA scientist warned that the Earth is unprepared for such an event.
context_section_description: Wrapping the asteroid in a sheet of reflective plastic such as aluminized PET film as a solar sail
  "Painting" or dusting the object with titanium dioxide (white) to alter its trajectory via increased reflected radiation pressure or with soot (black) to alter its trajectory via the Yarkovsky effect.
  Planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker in 1996 proposed deflecting a potential impactor by releasing a cloud of steam in the path of the object, hopefully gently slowing it. Nick Szabo in 1990 sketched a similar idea, "cometary aerobraking", the targeting of a comet or ice construct at an asteroid, then vaporizing the ice with nuclear explosives to form a temporary atmosphere in the path of the asteroid.
  Coherent digger array multiple 1 ton flat tractors able to dig and expel asteroid soil mass as a coherent fountain array, coordinated fountain activity may propel and deflect over years.
  Attaching a tether and ballast mass to the asteroid to alter its trajectory by changing its center of mass.
  Magnetic Flux Compression to magnetically brake and or capture objects that contain a high percentage of meteoric iron by deploying a wide coil of wire in its orbital path and when it passes through, Inductance creates an electromagnet solenoid to be generated.
caption: NASA study of a solar sail. The sail would be 0.5 kilometres (0.31 mi) wide.
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