What can sports tell us about meteors?

     Can we save the Earth by learning to throw a curveball in outer space?  The thought might not be as preposterous as it sounds.  A simple device may be a key to preserving our planet from impacts with the numerous dangerous objects floating around our solar system.

   Consider the humble meteor, a hunk of stone or perhaps ice moving on a certain trajectory that may threaten to coincide with that of our world.  Yet it is not necessarily stable as it moves.  Like a bullet, or perhaps more like a baseball, a meteor probably has some tumble as it speeds along.  There may be a way to make such tumble useful to us.  When a pitcher sizes up a batter, he wants to hit a certain spot the catcher designates.  He does not want the trajectory of the ball to be a straight line. Otherwise, every pitch might yield a home run.  Instead, he uses the seams of the baseball, the grip of his fingers, the motion of his wrist, and sometimes a little spit, to impart a non-ballistic motion to the ball, so that it won't follow the path the batter thinks he sees.

     A simple device may someday help scientists and engineers change the path of a meteor the same way a pitcher produces a curve ball or a slider to achieve the desired end. If we can first of all manage to track and determine the tumble of a meteor, and secondly to alter that tumble in such a way as to change its trajectory, we may have a tool for ensuring safety to all on Earth. So far, solutions for a meteor impact in science fiction have consisted of the old fall-back; a big explosion. Films and novels have generally focused on the idea of using explosives, particularly nuclear, to blast an impact body to pieces or move it out of the way.  In a nod to reality, these big explosions do not always work.  In some cases, they only slightly reduce the meteor, breaking it into numerous lethal parts, or fail because of the internal structure of the body, or have insufficient "braking power" to do the job. Occasionally the prospect of landing on the meteor as part of the solution is examined, but this tends to involve the high-risk, low-efficiency notion of "boots on the rock" in the form of astronauts.

     Since robotic space operations are really proving their success in recent years, let's get back to our simple device.  Okay, perhaps not so simple.  More efficient than transporting a man to a potential meteor is the proposal of sending a nice compact device, at first in a purely research mode.  I am talking about a device that is basically an enhanced recorder-transmitter that would attach itself to the body and study its tumble characteristics.  This is not as easy as I am making it sound, but it is perfectly feasible now that we have landed devices on moving comets.  So let's let Houston or Tokyo figure the details and go on to the next step.  Analyzing the tumble would involve the complicated step of accurately charting movement in relation to some stable reference point, not always without difficulty in a universe where everything is moving in relation to everything else.  Even our dependable sun may not be, in itself, a completely adequate reference point.  It might be necessary to allow our device to keep track of its position relative to some much more distant points, such as a triangulation of quasars.  A meteor has no seams like a baseball, but with quasars serving as the equivalent of a strike zone, we should be able to get a good understanding of tumble and its crucial aspect, that is, whether it is random or patterned.    Determining a tumble pattern is phase one.

     Next, our experts would have to go back to the drawing board and figure out if a patterned tumble can be altered by some other existing device, such as an ion drive, in order to change the trajectory of the meteor.  There is no certainty that it could, but it is worth finding out if it might be possible.  Just as there are no seams on a meteor, there is no atmosphere in space to affect its motion the way a pitcher can use the air to affect his baseball.  We might try looking into phenomena such as the solar wind, but it is not certain to play a role.  Likewise, the mass of a given meteor may prove too great to alter by the output of a surface-mounted drive that changes its tumble.  But we will never know unless we do the fundamental research and try.  I would argue that a single project of this nature may prove more practical in our celestial neighborhood than some long-distance projects already under way being discussed.

     Skeptics may argue, and rightfully so, that ion drives produce too little energy too slowly to be able to alter a meteor for practical purposes.  We should not forget, however, that other more powerful drives are being investigated, including laser and helium-3 drives.  The more complicated part of the operation may actually be determining the correct sequence for applying the drives during the tumble so as to achieve the maximum desired effect on the mass of the meteor to alter its trajectory.

     Of course, it's a long shot, but then everything involving space is, ipso facto, a long shot.  For now, it's an idea, and one that belongs to the -- I believe -- more fruitful category of interacting with the existing universe, instead of seeking to completely remake it.