How paintballs could save Earth from asteroids | Synopsis

How paintballs could save Earth from asteroids

01 The Solar System PIA10231, mod02 by Image Editor
License (according to Flickr): Attribution License

Excerpt:

An epic battle between paintballs and a giant asteroid could one day save the Earth from an apocalyptic space rock impact. The novel asteroid-deflecting scheme proposes that a cloud of paintballs shot into space could knock a dangerous asteroid off a collision course with Earth. Sung Wook Paek, an MIT graduate student, says a spacecraft could fire two rounds of pellets full of white paint powder at an asteroid to cover as much of the rock's surface as possible. The strategy, unveiled Friday (Oct. 26), won the 2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition, sponsored by the United Nations' Space Generation Advisory Council. The initial force from the paintballs would nudge the asteroid slightly off course, Paek says. And the pale paint job resulting from the splattered pellets would more than double the space rock's sunlight reflectivity.

Concepts:

Mercury Asteroid Solar System Sun Near-Earth object Comet Earth Orbit

People:

Sung Wook Paek

Overall Sentiment: 0.0659686

Relevance: 0.840985

Lindley Johnson

Overall Sentiment: -0.0925135

Relevance: 0.318229

Sentiment	Quote
-0.0328376	"It is very important that we develop and test a few deflection techniques sufficiently so that we know we have a viable 'toolbox' of deflection capabilities to implement when we inevitably discover an asteroid on an impact trajectory," Johnson said ...
Sentiment Stats:	Number of Quotes: 1 Aggregate Sentiment: -0.0328376 Mean: -0.0328376 Standard Deviation: 1.4142135623731

Key:

• Aggregate Sentiment is meant to be an indicator of an individual's overall sentiment.
• The Mean is meant to be an indicator of an individual's average comment sentiment.
• The Standard Deviation, when there are enough quotes, will indicate an individual's consistency of sentiment (i.e. a Standard Deviation of 0 would mean they were very consistent in their sentiment and 1 would mean they were very inconsistent).

Note that quote stats are likely to be meaningless beyond the aggregate score due to the tiny sample size. However, they are always provided just in case you find something useful there.

Additional Info:

Organization: United Nations' Space Generation Advisory Council

Overall Sentiment: 0.0583344

Relevance: 0.362658

Organization: NASA

Overall Sentiment: 0

Relevance: 0.301077

Disambiguation: Company | GovernmentAgency | AirportOperator | AwardPresentingOrganization | SoftwareDeveloper | SpaceAgency | SpacecraftManufacturerReferences:

• NASA
• NASA: dbpedia
• NASA: freebase
• NASA: umbel
• NASA: opencyc
• NASA: yago

Webpage Meta Info

Webpage Provided Desc:

MIT student proposes radical plan to protect Earth with clouds of paintballs in space

URL Provided Keywords:

• Apophis
• asteroids
• lindley johnson
• MIT
• paintball
• space.com
• SPACE.com Staff
• sung wook paek

Webpage Provided Title:

How paintballs could save Earth from asteroids

Source Site: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsSciTech/~3/Lxc_zRE0rFk/

Data Sources

Full Content: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsSciTech/~3/Lxc_zRE0rFk/

http://www.alchemyapi.com/