A meteor blast over Russia is putting new focus on a transatlantic effort to crash a spacecraft into a far-flung asteroid in a bid to prove that incoming objects from space can be knocked from their path.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory are preparing a decade-long, $350 million project to propel a rocket into the asteroid Didymos as it passes close to Earth. If successful, it would be the first time an asteroid is knocked off course by human intervention.

“There is a science aspect to it and a planetary defense aspect to it,” Andy Cheng, the chief scientist of the physics laboratory in Laurel, said in an interview.

Cheng said he developed a plan for a lower-cost test for smacking an asteroid as a way to revive a shelved European effort. In a sign of the steep odds it faced, the initial European plan was called Don Quijote, named after the fictional Spanish knight who tussled with windmills he thought to be giants.

The conceptual study has support from NASA and the European Space Agency. They jointly published an initial plan for the project in May. If the plan goes forward, NASA would help Cheng’s group fund and launch “the impactor.” The ESA, which announced this month a call for research ideas on the mission, would launch a second spacecraft to assess the impact and its effect.

Defense of the planet against asteroids, a longtime focus of former astronauts, astronomers and amateur hobbyists, became the topic of worldwide discussions recently as the largest meteor to explode near Earth in a century blew out windows and injured 1,200 near the city of Chelyabinsk in central Russia, near the border with Kazakhstan.

Read More via After meteor blast in Russia, Laurel lab plans to smack an asteroid – The Washington Post.

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