But in response to a question from Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Dr. Lu said that given enough lead time, there were various ways to divert an asteroid to make it miss Earth entirely, including something as basic as running into it with a spacecraft to nudge it just a bit.
Let's send a picture of ourselves vintage 1977 and put it on a spacecraft and send it out there forever.
There is an atmosphere, but it is extremely thin — and NASA is spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars to study it with a spacecraft launched on Friday.
The company's Convair division had built the Atlas, an intercontinental ballistic missile, and then received a federal contract to convert it into a spacecraft capable of lifting astronauts into orbit.
In May 2009, NASA took a big gamble: It launched a spacecraft on a $600 million mission to hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars that could harbor life.
You may not see it, but a spacecraft whizzing 350 miles (560km) above Earth is going to use our planet to slingshot its way towards another one.
It is a spacecraft that would scoop as much as 2 kilograms of rocky soil off a 600-meter-diameter asteroid in 2020 and return the sample to the Utah desert in 2023 for laboratory analysis.
It considers a spacecraft that is continuously above either the north or south pole and, as such, can provide real-time, continuous and hemispherical coverage of the polar regions.
A scene in which Craig's character rides a horse alongside a ravine and jumps down it onto a spacecraft emulated many scenes in American Western films where cowboys rode along a moving train and jumped on it.
Nasa has already demonstrated something that you could use to deflect an asteroid, it was its "Deep Impact" mission — it basically flew a spacecraft into the asteroid and hit it at high speed.
