Quote:
Originally Posted by polak
we should really invest more in detection satellites. I thought they were really good at catching the big ones and fairly good at the small ones if they're coming at us as they go towards the sun.
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I read an article this weekend on one of the major news sites (cbc, bloomberg something like that) about the detection systems we currently use. Essentially, the sky is so vast that we can't survey every possible trajectory that an asteroid could come from, but instead focus our efforts on the most likely direction given gravity and orbits etc. Someone far more knowledgeable about astrophysics can probably explain it better.
Interesting thing about the article is that it mentioned that there has been a large amount of planning for dealing with a meteor of significant size on a collision course with Earth. Think Bruce Willis + lasers.