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.

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

"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...