One of the complexities we have to deal with in trying to understand planet formation is things don’t stay where you put them. Worlds that start in one orbit may end up somewhere entirely different, as objects ranging from comets to ice giants to rocky asteroids all get tossed about through gravitational interactions.

At more than 5 billion years old, our solar system has moved past the worst of its rock flinging days, but there are still objects out there hitting our planet on a regular basis. Earlier this week, a meteor fell in Europe, and it sometimes seems that every month a new object is found passing between the Earth and the Moon. While we haven’t found anything truly dangerous yet, at some point we are likely to find a city or civilization killer. Trying to figure out how to protect our planet is a top priority for a lot of scientists and in a new paper in Acta Astronautica, a team of MIT researchers describe a new algorithm for deciding how different kinds of asteroids should be deflected, based on their composition, orbit, and how far away they are when they are detected.

Now… we just have to develop the technology this algorithm counts on if we want to actually be able to take its advice. But that’s a problem for another day.

More Information

• MIT engineers devise a decision map to identify the best mission type to deflect an incoming asteroid. (MIT)