Op-Ed: Good news for a change — NASA proves there’s a defense against killer asteroids
Posted: Fri 2:20 PM, Mar 10, 2014 | 
Updated: Fri 4:14 PM, Mar 10, 2014
This week, a group of researchers from the U.S. and Russia announced new evidence showing that humans can safely deflect asteroids by using lasers to reflect or heat them. This discovery is potentially the second most important advance in Earth defense in history, after the Apollo moon landing itself.
By Robert Pearlman
This week, a group of researchers from the U.S. and Russia announced new evidence showing that humans can safely deflect asteroids by using lasers to reflect or heat them.
This discovery is potentially the second most important advance in Earth defense in history, after the moon landing itself.
A small piece of one of the few actual examples of a moon rock brought back by Apollo astronauts has been subjected to a series of tests and is currently sitting on a table in its storage vault at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
To begin, that rock known as “Returned Astronaut’s Moon B, ” or R-MOAB, was first subjected to infrared imaging testing in a special infrared camera at JPL. It was then subjected to a series of tests to test how well it could withstand heat.
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NASA is confident it has solved the puzzle of how to protect the United States from a near-Earth asteroid strike. But in a twist of irony, this finding may also be a gift from the moon.
“This work represents a real scientific breakthrough that would not have been made without the cooperation of the Russians,” said U.S. space agency manager James Zahnle, in a news conference with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov, who was aboard the Soyuz spacecraft that sent three other NASA astronauts home from the space station.
“When we first began considering a potential asteroid strike, it was clear to us that R-MOAB had special value. We needed to figure out how to best use it to protect our nation,” said Zahnle, who added that the U.S. plans to use the results of the research