Design of probe unveiled to land on asteroid and protect Earth from catastrophic impact

Chinese scientists have unveiled designs for a spacecraft that could help deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, China News Services has reported.

The probe would land on Apophis, a 46 million tonne asteroid, and collect data to help develop a “solar sail” technique to prevent it from hitting our planet, according to researchers from Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, Jiangsu.

The Apophis is one of the most deadly threats to Earth.

Stretching nearly 400 metres across, it is the largest among nearly a thousand known asteroids that could hit Earth. If that happened, possibly in 2036 according some estimates, the catastrophic impact would be equivalent to detonating 100,000 atomic bombs.

But Chinese scientists have been working on a proposal to protect our planet. In 2011, Dr Gong Shengping’s team at Tsinghua University in Beijing released a proposal to deflect the Apophis with a solar sail.

The sail – weighing just 10kg but with a large area – would help deflect the asteroid from its collision course by harnessing the power of solar wind.

But the Tsinghua proposal faced numerous technical difficulties. One of the key problems was the structure and composition of the Apophis, which is still a mystery to scientists.