MOSCOW, July 5. /TASS/. Precautions against the asteroids and meteorites bearing potential threat to the Earth should require solutions on a global scale, Dr. Radiy Ilkayev, the honorary chief research supervisor at the All-Russia Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics [VNIIEF, reporting to the state atomic energy corporation Rosatom - TASS] told TASS on Thursday.
"Protection from asteroids should be a task of a global scale and the efforts to resolve it should embrace, in the first place, the countries with expansive capabilities in research and technologies," Dr. Ilkayev said. "You need a very high level of technologies even if you want just to trace an asteroid."
"More than that, you have to calculate its trajectory and to evaluate the risks it poses to the Earth," he said. "If it does pose risk, then you’ll have to tap the ways to rebuff them."
"And if some wants to wield impact on an asteroid, a country must have high-power explosives, or in other words, thermonuclear weapons, which only great nuclear powers can afford," Dr. Ilkayev said.
June 30, 2018, marked the 110th anniversary since the fall of a celestial object in the area of Podkamennaya Tunguska River in central Siberia. The inhabitants of local villages said they saw a huge fiery ball dash the skies.
The body that was termed later on the Tunguska Meteorite exploded at an altitude of 7 km to 10 km. Researchers say the power of the explosion was between 40 megatons to 50 megatons.
The explosion felled trees on an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers.