Something has to be done or at least attempted in our day and age;)It is so tempting to have a laugh at the lack of ways or lack of genuine interest in the possibility (but more importantly) means of irradicating the threat that some part of the world would have experienced serious devistation if this big rock hit our planet.....Not enough is being done and I beleive this should be top priority alone with all the other suffering that happens now....whats the point in helping the world get it sorted when we are unprotected from something like that which could destroy a nation on its own...we have the technology but it's not being directed pointedly to possible disasters and other means of early detection.Lets hope this and previous close calls finally makes nations get together to protect whats ours or at the least get it together to detect potential threats ahead of time and come up with a solution to send a warhead into space to neutralize that threat. It seems that on the face of it there is no technology available right now to counter a threat of this kind. As said, maybe we should go for this....better than spending billions in the old Cold War crisis surely;)..and seems more beneficial really.RegardsDave

>Lets hope this and previous close calls finally makes nations get together to protect whats oursHa! You're having a laugh aren't you! In the next decade ~100 million people will be infected with HIV, and still hundereds of millions starve whilst our 'civilised' nations do nothing to reduce third-world debt. Not that it would help much, the worlds multinational drug companies would rather destroy their excess pharmaceutical agents rather than 'donate' them to those whose need mostr yet can afford the least.Asteroid? Huh! Bring it on!! Let some other species have a go at running the planet.Paul

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/paul.haworth/Fortress.gifVoted Best Virtual Airline of 2002 and Best CEO of 2002 by participants in the BIG VA Vote organized by FSPILOT.comVANF "Best" New Virtual Airline Awardhttp://homepage.ntlworld.com/paul.haworth/saint_georgex1.gif

>Asteroid? Huh! Bring it on!! Let some other species have a go at running the planet.;)RegardsDave

bring in the aliens from men in black 2 :-lol

>I take you are not to keen on being a member of the human race then?If you mean am I particularly proud of (some) of mankinds "achievements", then No! As far as HIV/Cancer et al being "the long-term battle" - I would suppose this wouldn't necessarily be in the long-term if the First World were to stop behaving like the insular, self-centred, money-grabbing nations they are. I'm not a communist, but there's more to life - and humanity - than money and armaments.Slightly on another note, since the nature of the posters here is international: why exactly did Bush remove the US from the Kyoto Agreement? Didn't suit the US industrialists, perhaps? And then there's the ABM treaty...... Cheers,Paul

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/paul.haworth/Fortress.gifVoted Best Virtual Airline of 2002 and Best CEO of 2002 by participants in the BIG VA Vote organized by FSPILOT.comVANF "Best" New Virtual Airline Awardhttp://homepage.ntlworld.com/paul.haworth/saint_georgex1.gif

If its going to hit us I wouldn't want to know! Maybe they did see the Asteroid and didn't let us know for that reason!.Kevin

I am sorry, The first thing that came to mind as I read this was the guy's on Monty Python's The Holy Grail screaming "Run Away!!- Run Away!!!!! Surf To Java, Dude's And Dudettes!!:-wink2

First, credentials:I was the first human being to see the Grand Canyon on Mars. I saw it with planetary radar, from Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, montsh before the Voyager Orbiter pictures. The guy who was running the project never published it.I also am doing rocket science right now, specifically anti-rocket science. I've been doing this for 15+ years now.Next, my opinions:We should be looking. We have the capabilities, and they get better all the time. This last one was one we should have seen, but we missed. It's a big solar system, and the targets are very, very small. We have to do this optically, because we just can't detect it with the current technology using radar. So, we need to depend on a certain reflectivity off the object, that is, how much sunlight bounces off vs. how much is absorbed. My guess is, this guy was pretty dark, and he didn't give us a lot of time. (Bad news. "He didn't give us a lot of time" means he was moving fast, so he had a lot of kinetic energy compared to the "average" asteroid. That kinetic energy is what does the damage when it hits.What can we do? If we have less than a year, nothing yet. After that, we might do something. Forget the movies that re-program our nuclear missiles to intercept the asteroid. These are are sub-orbital vehicles, and the warheads are miniscule compared to the kind of payloads we would need. We would have to build Saturn-class systems, a lot of them, and put them up quickly. But yeah, if it came down to it, we could do it. Best of all, it would be the best thing we as a civilization had ever done, and if we all put it together it would possibly change us forever.

I assume that you are referring to the VIKING Orbiter pictures ?The reduced observational time span is very likely to be due to the faster apparent motion of the object across the sky (due to its close proximity to Earth), rather than any higher than normal levels of kinetic energy when compared to the average NEO. Let's just hope that the next object calculated to hit us isn't a large comet, otherwise the kinetic energy really will be colossal !Chris Low,ENGLAND.