The next time a giant asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, we shouldn’t expect Bruce Willis and his nukes from “Armageddon” to save us.
Instead, we should call the pocket-protector wearing scientists at MIT and their paintball guns.
According to a new paper, the scientists and their paintball guns would blast an earth-bound asteroid with a ton of paintball pellets turning the rock blindingly white whereupon it would reflect enough sunlight to push it off its course of destruction.
Shockingly, this technique is not the work of science fiction but is instead the real life work of MIT graduate student Sung Wook Paek, who won the United Nation’s “2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition,” according to MIT.edu.
Other competitors suggested sci-fi like methods for deflecting an Earth-destroying asteroid like launching spaceships or projectiles to knock the rock off course while others threw out the “Armageddon” solution by detonating nuclear bombs, but Paek’s idea won because of its novelty and feasibility.
The paintballs would start moving the asteroid with the initial jolt created by the mass of paintballs hitting the space rock. After that, the freshly painted planetoid would slowly keep moving off course because of solar radiation pressure — the pressure exerted on objects by light from the sun.
Paek suggested turning the asteroid ultra bright white because the closer an object is to white the more solar radiation pressure it feels — a phenomenon that has been observed when satellites were thrown out of orbit and has been used to create sails for spacecrafts, much in the same way that boat sails work.
The only problems with Paek’s paintball method were getting the paintballs into space intact and the amount of time it would take to actually deflect the asteroid.
To solve the first problem Paek suggested creating a paintball factory on something like the International Space Station while the second problem would be solved by long-term planning because it could take up to twenty years to move an asteroid capable of destroying Earth using the paintball method.