We could protect Earth from dangerous asteroids using a huge magnet
We could deflect potentially hazardous asteroids by using an enormous magnet to gently pull them apart. This idea avoids some of the pitfalls of the more traditional kinetic impactor method, which involves smashing something into an asteroid to move it, but it has yet to be tested, so we can’t be sure it would work.
The idea is called non-contact orbital velocity adjustment, or NOVA, and Gunther Kletetschka at the University of Alaska Fairbanks presented it at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas on 17 March.
