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Scientists urge action to deal with asteroid likely to hit Earth.

LONDON scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390m-wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima.

Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere. In Egyptian myth, Apophis was the ancient spirit of evil and destruction, a demon that was determined to plunge the world into eternal darkness.

The experts fear that there is very little time left to decide.

At a recent meeting in London of experts in near-Earth objects (NEOs), scientists said it could take decades to design, test and build the required technology to deflect the asteroid.

Ms Monica Grady, an expert in meteorites at the Open University, said: "It's a question of when, not if, a near-Earth object collides with Earth. Many of the smaller objects break up when they reach the Earth's atmosphere and have no impact.

"However, a NEO larger than 1km (wide) will collide with Earth every few hundred thousand years and a NEO larger than 6km, which could cause mass extinction, will collide with Earth every hundred million years. We are overdue for a big one."

Apophis had been intermittently tracked since its discovery in June last year but, in December, it started causing serious concern.

Projecting the orbit of the asteroid into the future, astronomers had calculated that the odds of it hitting the Earth in 2029 were alarming. As more observations came in, the odds got higher.

However there are no shortage of ideas on how to deflect asteroids. The Advanced Concepts Team at the European Space Agency have led the effort in designing a range of satellites and rockets to nudge asteroids on a collision course for Earth into a different orbit.

- The Guardian