The large asteroid Apophis is BAAAACK!
Russia's Roscosmos space agency chief, Antoly Perminov, is advising that the world's space agencies take the Apophis asteriod impact threat seriously, saying "lives are at stake," in a statement to a Russian news agency. "We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would ... prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people."
Perminov is saying that "calculations show that it's possible to create a special purpose spacecraft within the time we have" and "the threat of collision can be averted" if the Russia's , American, European, and Chinese space agencies band together to do build space defense hardware before the 2036 impact date. There is more in this Agence France Presse report, from Pravda with video, and The Guardian.
The impact of Apophis, as suggested by the Russians, would be much larger than the impact at Meteor Crater in Arizona and described as three times the size of the almost three times as large as the Tunguska meteorite that struck Sibera over 100-years ago. Here is more on the the asteriod threat from A.C. Charania's Planetary Defense blog.
America's NASA has plans to defend against the asteriod. The United Nations has been listening to the counsel of former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart on these matters for some time. Congress has taken the matter seriously and funded Near Earth Asteroid searches but not building hardware yet to do it.
Near Earth Objects and Planetary Defence group made a volunteer made video documentary last month about the current issues surrounding defending the Earth from Asteroid and Comet impacts in four parts.
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