Space experts meet to discuss asteroid deflection technologies

The so-called Neotwist project, a collaborative EU-funded initiative that includes a team from Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, is one of a number of technologies under discussion this week (15 – 18 May, 2017) at the Planetary Defence Conference in Tokyo.

Despite being a staple of science fiction stories – perhaps most notably in 1998 disaster movie Deep Impact – comets and asteroids do pose a real threat to the Earth and collisions have taken place frequently over geological history. It’s thought that past impacts have probably altered the evolutionary course of life on Earth by, for instance, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs.

There are currently thought to be around 1600 near Earth objects (NEOs) considered by scientists to be potentially hazardous (i.e. having orbits that can bring them within 7.5 million kilometres of the Earth’s orbit and are large enough (diameter ≥ 100 m) to destroy a large city or urban area and kill millions of people.