Russia considers sending craft to Apophis

In the Irish Times today:

www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/1231/breaking48.htm

When you think about it, isnt it a great oppertunity to study how you might deflect one of these asteroids, so long as their experiments dont have it ending up landing in Washington,Ukraine or Chechnya. :silly:

Oh God that not good news to be reading:woohoo: :X

"People's lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people," Perminov said.

Hmmm. The chance of Apophis *MISSING* the Earth is about 99.9996%

It is 50 times more likely that an unknown asteroid (the size of Apophis) will hit Earth between now and 2036.

This sounds more like "muscle flexing" than a Russian mission with any credible objective. They'd be better spending their money on detecting currently unknown Apophis sized potential impactors rather than on a mission to deflect Apophis from a non-impacting trajectory. Unless they know something we don't...