Welcome to Gaia! ::

Pretty neat setup, all these scientists are worried about asteroids making a mess out of our planet, and they've come up with all sorts of ways to deal with them such as nukes, giant lasers, gravity tugs, everything.

But one thing they never really thought of was actually hijacking an asteroid, although sci-fi writers thought of this all the time with aliens exterminating the human race by throwing asteroids at the planet, they never thought of throwing an asteroid at an asteroid.

But that's what this proposal calls for, by getting a robot to hijack a small enough asteroid and then eject material into space, it's sort of like a primitive thruster, reminds me of those leeches from that one game.

Anyway, the robot pilots it's new asteroid/spaceship into a Lagrange point, where the gravity between earth and the sun balance eachother out, and so the object inside this point won't drift towards any extraterrestrial bodies anytime soon.

Once a threat reveals itself, the robot ejects more material and goes straight for the rival asteroid, hopefully bumping it out of the way or even breaking it up, and might even beat Al-Qaeda's record for crashing one thing into another.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060620_science_tuesday.html

There's the link, complete with more details, things you have to worry about when going kamikaze on an asteroid, and other stuff.

lol The military wants space weapons so badly, there you go, relatively cheap space WMD right there.

yeah, who knows.

Keep in mind we're still searching for all the objects that could possibly pose a threat to us, including one object that scored a two on the little asteroid rating scale (can't remember the name of the scale), new record.

I hope not, but it's still possible...

I'd rather go for a plan that wouldn't break up the big asteroid into smaller ones that would still hit the Earth and do a lot of damage... but it's still better than nothing, if nothing else works out...