Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids

This book presents the most recent thinking on the development of a reliable defence against objects that could potentially collide with the Earth. Large asteroids and comets can collide with the Earth with severe consequences and collisions are a random process that could occur at any time. To reduce the threat, it is necessary to understand the orbital motions of potentially hazardous objects, probe their structural and compositional nature to a high level of detail, and measure how they respond to the application of large amounts of energy or momentum.