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In January 2007 this author served as Principal Investigator (P. I.) for the Kinetic Deflection of NEOs during a Study conducted by NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, USA.
The well-known asteroid 99942 Apophis was used as asteroid test-case, and the Study foresaw three different ways of achieving its deflection by only resorting to the two brand-new NASA launchers, Ares I and Ares V. These three envisaged, alternative deflection techniques are, respectively:
Nuclear Deflection, achieved by virtue of a B83 nuclear warhead (Prof. John Remo of Harvard University served as P. I. for this nuclear deflection study);
Kinetic Deflection, i. e. deflection achieved by (at most) six impinging 1.5 t projectiles (this author served as P. I.);
Solar Collector, i. e. deflection achieved by a Sunlight beam focused by a two-mirror Solar Collector upon the asteroid (Prof. Gregory Matloff of NYC Technical College was P. I.).
The results of this NASA Study ([1]) were first presented publicly by Dr. Robert B. Adams, the Study Team Leader, at the Planetary Defense Conference held in Washington D. C., USA, March 5-8, 2007. In this author's view, however, the importance of these NASA plans for NEO deflection are such that he asked for and obtained from NASA full permission to present anew Dr. Rob Adam's 2007 Presentation at the "Solar System Bodies" Conference held in Kharkov, the Ukraine, May 26-29, 2008. Again, he presented this NASA Study anew at the St. Petersburg International Conference "Asteroid-Comet Hazard-2009" (ACH-2009), September 21-25, 2009. It is thus hoped that this new presentation will be of help to Russian and European Space Scientists interested in the Deflection of Hazardous NEOs.