Can NASA, Laser Weapons Stop Asteroid Armageddon?

WESTMINSTER, Calif. - Feb. 21, 2016 - PRLog -- What on Earth is going on? NASA recently announced the formation of a Planetary Defense Office. Now Russian scientists say they are reprogramming their ICBMs to knock out incoming asteroids like the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk in February 2013. Do they know something we don’t?

Preventing asteroid Armageddon has also become the main focus for experimental cosmologist Philip Lubin at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lubin and his team are hard at work developing laser weapons powerful enough to vaporize near-Earth objects (NEO) up to 1,500 feet wide. But the asteroid that famously wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was over 35,000 feet wide.

According to Russia’s news agency, TASS, the Chelyabinsk asteroid was no bigger than a school bus when it exploded 18 miles over the city, damaging thousands of structures and sending over 1,500 people to area hospitals. It was a pipsqueak compared to Apophis, an asteroid the size of three football fields, due for a near-Earth flyby in 2029, according to NASA.

Apophis's expected visit inspired RUNAWAY MOON, Howard Brian Edgar’s chilling post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller. After reading about Apophis years ago, he chose to set his end-of-the-world survival story in 2029, but with a twist. Edgar’s “asteroid on steroids” is a rogue dwarf planet named Diablo, which is 1,000 miles wide compared to Apophis at 1,000 feet.

In RUNAWAY MOON, Diablo narrowly misses Earth and slams into the moon head-on at 50,000 miles per hour. The resulting rock storm and shockwaves rain death and destruction down on Earth, where possibly the last two dozen human survivors find themselves back in the Stone Age fighting for their lives amid massive climatic and geologic upheavals.

While RUNAWAY MOON’s rogue dwarf planet collision with the moon is mathematically unlikely, it is scientifically plausible, according to astronomers. They have identified numerous rogue dwarf planets, some larger than Jupiter, throughout the Milky Way and believe there are 200 or more dwarf planets like Pluto and thousands of supersize comets, known as centaurs, out in the Kuiper Belt. About every 40,000 years, a gravitational deflection sends one of those monster rogues hurtling into the inner Solar System where we live. If that were to happen, no power on Earth, including NASA, Russia's nuclear stockpile or laser weapons could deflect or destroy it.

“It's amusing to hear NASA officials, Russian and American scientists talk about defending our planet against anything larger than fifteen hundred feet. We are decades away from having the technology to destroy something the size of the dinosaur killer, much less a rogue dwarf planet that’s twice the size of Texas,” says RUNAWAY MOON’s author.

“It’s only a matter of time before we face a final mass extinction from an object that’s simply too large for us to stop. All we can do is hope that it doesn’t happen during our lifetime.”

-END-

Check out the free sample of RUNAWAY MOON here: http://www.amazon.com/RUNAWAY-MOON-Howard-Brian-Edgar-ebo...