* Astronomy

Threat of space objects demands international coordination, UN team says

In the wake of a meteor impact in Russia that shattered windows over a wide area, injuring hundreds of people and terrifying thousands, a United Nations team today called for international cooperation to face the threat of near space objects.
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Russia may build rocket to destroy Earth-threatening asteroids

Russia could start building a space rocket capable of destroying asteroids threatening the Earth, chief of rocket and space corporation Energia said Friday.
To change the orbit of a small planet of Apophis' size, a 70-ton rocket was needed to "tow" an asteroid away from Earth or to destroy it with a thermonuclear blast
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'Nuke won't save us from asteroid'

When Bruce Willis used a nuclear bomb to save Earth from a giant asteroid in the movie Armageddon, the scenario had little science and a lot of fiction, physicists have said.
Willis' nuke would have had as much impact on the rock as a cheap firecracker and was used so late that the planet would have been doomed anyway, they said.
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Bombshell over 'doomsday asteroid'

A team of physics students calculated it would have to be a billion times more powerful than the largest nuclear device ever detonated on Earth, the Soviet Union's 50-megaton hydrogen bomb "Big Ivan".
The asteroid would also have to be detected much earlier than the one in the film to stand any chance of splitting it in time.
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Martin Griffiths: There's no point worrying about asteroid armageddon

The probability of a major impact occurring in a politically relevant timescale (say, during our lifetimes) is extremely low, but not outside the bounds of possibility.
The impact hazard is, therefore, a terrifying prospect that remains the ultimate high-consequence, low-probability hazard. Predicting Armageddon is more than producing an array of facts and figures, but involves concerns relating to recent impacts.
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