Man vs. the Universe

How to Kill an Asteroid (1x2)

Air date: Aug 20, 2014

Asteroids have decimated life on Earth before and they will again. Across the globe, scientists, engineers and astronauts are gearing up for a cosmic battle to hunt asteroids and prevent them from hitting us. In this episode viewers will meet the experts building new telescopes and space probes to detect the estimated one million asteroids out there that could wipe out an entire city. We’ll explore plans to knock an incoming asteroid off course with a kamikaze spacecraft, or to shoot asteroids down with giant space lasers. And we go inside the craziest NASA mission ever proposed – to capture an asteroid in deep space with a giant bag and move it to the Moon.