Bizarre plot to MOVE Earth by ‘slingshotting asteroids’ at us could prevent fiery apocalypse
It's actually more sensible than it sounds
In the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, recently released on Netflix, humanity attempts to change the Earth’s orbit using enormous thrusters in order to escape the expanding sun – and prevent a collision with Jupiter.
The scenario may one day come true. In five billion years, the sun will run out of fuel and expand, most likely engulfing the Earth.
These are clearly not applicable to Earth due to their destructive nature.
Other techniques instead involve a very gentle, continuous push over a long time, provided by a docked on the surface of the asteroid, or a spacecraft hovering near it (pushing through or other methods).
We could point and fire an electric thruster in the trailing direction of Earth’s orbit.
Interplanetary billiard
A well-known technique for two orbiting bodies to exchange momentum and change their velocity is with a close passage, or gravitational slingshot.
As a result, the gravity field of the Earth imparted a substantial acceleration to Rosetta, which would have been unachievable solely using thrusters.
Consequently, the Earth received an opposite and equal impulse – although this did not have any measurable effect due to Earth’s mass.
Some regions of the solar system are dense with small bodies such as asteroids and comets, the mass of many of which is small enough to be moved with realistic technology, but still orders of magnitude larger than what can be realistically launched from Earth.
With accurate trajectory design, it is possible to exploit so-called “Δv leveraging” – a small body can be nudged out of its orbit and as a result swing past the Earth, providing a much larger impulse to our planet.
This may seem exciting, but it has been estimated that we would need , each spaced about a few thousand years apart, to keep up with the sun’s expansion.
But while it is theoretically possible, and may one day be technically feasible, it might actually be easier to move our species to our planetary next-door neighbour, Mars, which may survive the sun’s destruction.
We have, after all, already and its surface .
This article was written by Matteo Ceriotti, lecturer in space systems engineering at the University of Glasgow for .
A Nasa simulation recently revealed how an asteroid would flatten New York if planetary defence systems failed.
Here is the full list of enormous "doomsday" asteroids Nasa thinks might crash into Earth.
And watch a 3D animation of what a 500km asteroid hitting Earth would look like.
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