Roscosmos will soon consider a project to prevent a large
asteroid from colliding with Earth after 2030, the head of
Russia's space agency said on Wednesday. "A scientist recently
told me an interesting thing about the path [of an asteroid]
constantly nearing Earth... He has calculated that it will
surely collide with Earth in the 2030s," Anatoly Perminov said
during an interview with the Voice of Russia radio. He referred
to Apophis, an asteroid that he said was almost three times as
large as the Tunguska meteorite. On June 30, 1908, an explosion
equivalent to between 5 and 30 megatons of TNT occurred near the
Podkamennaya Tunguska River in a remote region of Russia's
Siberia. The Tunguska blast flattened 80 million trees,
destroying an area of around 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles).
Perminov said Russia was not planning to destroy the asteroid.
"No nuclear explosions [will be carried out], everything [will
be done] on the basis of the laws of physics," he said. The
Russian space official also said after having c