RESEARCH

The James Bond film, Die Another Day, had a fictitious North Korean terrorist scheming to set the Earth ablaze with harnessed solar energy. Now, some scientists want to use the idea to burn out asteroids rushing headlong towards us. Surajit Dasgupta differentiates science from fiction Last week, a large section of the popular Indian media was abuzz with the possibility of an asteroid, Apophis, hitting the Earth after William Ailor, director of the Centre for Orbital and Re-entry Studies, Aerospace Corporation, predicted that the collision could occur in 2036 if not in 2029. Elsewhere, Boris Shustov, director of the Institute of Astronomy, Russia, said on October 1 that the impact of the asteroid, of size equal to three football fields, would cause far more devastation than what the asteroid that hit Siberia in 1908 did. The Tunguska astral event affected 2150 sq km and blasted eight crore odd trees. The force of the impact was about 1,000 times more powerful than that by the atomic bo...