On TMQ and NASA

To quote TMQ:

If a rock comparable to the one that struck the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago struck today in Kansas, half the population of the United States might die. And as TMQ endlessly points out, what is NASA doing about this? Absolutely nothing.

I try to just enjoy his NFL analysis and ignore his random off-topic rants, but every once in a while he says something that demands that I act like a typical reader and fire off an email telling him I'm never reading his drivel again. This time, my willpower held, though. Well, until he said this:

But my point was that NASA is doing nothing whatsoever to design or even research devices that might stop a comet or asteroid approaching our world.

So, here is my response:

Lu and Love of NASA's Johnson Space Center have published an article on this topic. Let's see -- NASA employees -- check, researching a device to deflect an asteroid -- check, publishing their results -- check. It seems that this suggests that your statement is unequivocally wrong. A simple Google search for "Gravitational Tractor" turns up the following, among 500+ results:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7065/full/438177a.html
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20051112/fob8.asp

You could also find this written up in Wikipedia, in various major newspapers (I think it was in the NYT), and in NASA press releases, for example.

In some ways, it is nice to see a column on ESPN's website that includes as much astronomy as TMQ. However, he occasionally makes strongly negative statements about big science projects, and when he's wrong (as it took me about 0.003 seconds on google to prove), I think it does more harm than good.

He makes a good argument against using a 7 or 8 man blitz, though.