Two or three years (after impact), these things won't change," said Michel.It is about 160 metres (525 feet) wide, the size of an object that would hit Earth with the equivalent force of 400 megatonnes of TNT, "more than the largest hydrogen bomb," said Cheng."European Space Agency boss Jan Woerner told AFP "we will go forward with a new proposal" for the next ministerial meeting in 2019."There are measurements that AIM can make that DART cannot," said Cheng."We have never # tested asteroid deflection and there is no way we can test in (the) laboratory.. But we found something I think that still works and allows to relax the very tight schedule.

The new price tag? About 210 million euros, said Patrick Michel, the science lead for the European part of the project."Scientists from both sides of the Atlantic urged European congress participants to sell the project to their national representatives.In its new form, AIM could still do these crucial measurements even if NASA sticks to its own timeline and hits Didymoon in 2022."It is important for humanity, as a species we have the means today to deflect an asteroid. (Photo: AFP) Space scientists urged Europe Wednesday to rethink its withdrawal from a futuristic, international dry-run for an Armageddon-like mission to deflect a space rock on a calamitous collision course with Earth.He is the project scientist for the American part of the AIDA mission, named Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which has entered Phase B -- meaning it has been approved but still needs final confirmation.

And of course there will be a delay. It's not a question of if, but when," he said by email..""We have not discovered any asteroid that is actually coming to Earth," said Cheng, but "we may still discover one" among the thousands of hazardous space rocks believed to be out there. that we have the two at the same time.Dubbed AIDA (Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment), the test mission is crucial if we are to develop the capacity to protect our planet from incoming projectiles, they said.At the meeting in the Latvian capital, European scientists proposed an altered, slightly cheaper alternative for AIM. We can do something," stressed Cheng.Europe's contribution, to send a small craft close to the action to measure the crash and its impact, suffered a setback when space ministers rejected a 250-million-euro ($300-million) funding request last December.An asteroid that exploded in the atmosphere over Siberia in 2013 injured some 1,600 people. We know it will happen, one day sooner or later. We need to know if our models are correct, (whether) our simulations work as expected.The test mission is crucial if we are to develop the capacity to protect our planet from incoming projectiles.Didymos's moon Didymoon, the target of the AIDA mission, falls in an even more dangerous size range.

The project was called AIM, for Asteroid Impact Mission."This is the kind of disaster that could be a tremendous catastrophe," Andrew Cheng from Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory told AFP at a European Planetary Science Congress in Riga. An asteroid that exploded in the atmosphere over Siberia in 2013 injured some 1,600 people."Of course it's better.Unlike most other natural hazards, an asteroid strike "is something that the world is able to defend.DART will entail smashing a spacecraft into the tiny moon of a faraway asteroid dubbed Didymos to alter its trajectory -- a scientific first."We all together have to convince the national delegations to spend some money for this mission," added ESA's Michael Kueppers

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