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Let's all start up some crazy space companies together: harvest hydrogen on Jupiter, trap black holes as unlimited energy supplies, use high temperatures close to the sun to bake bread! Apparently it is really easy to do just about anything and Deep Space Industries is really good at it. Plus: in their video they show Mars One concepts while referring to ESA and NASA.

hmm aside from the technological feasibility, their approach still should be taken as an example, and deserve a little support. By tackling such difficult problems, they will devise innovative stuffs. Plus, even if this doom-to-fail endeavour may still seem you useless, it creates jobs and make people think... it is already a positive! Final word: how is that different from what Planetary Resources plan to do? It is founded by a bunch of so-called "nuts" ... (http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/) ! a little thought: "We must never be afraid to go too far, for success lies just beyond" - Proust

I don't think that this proposal is very different from the one by Planetary Resources. My scepticism is rooted in the fact that - at least to my knowledge - fully autonomous mining technology has not even been demonstrated on Earth. I am sure that their proposition is in principle (technically) feasible but at the same time I do not believe that a privately funded company will find enough people to finance a multi-billion dollar R&D project that may or may not lead to an economically sensible outcome, i.e. generate profit (not income - you have to pay back the R&D cost first) within the next 25 years. And on that timescale anything can happen - for all we know we will all be slaves to the singularity by the time they start mining. I do think that people who tackle difficult problems deserve support - and lots of it. It seems however that up till now they have only tackled making a promotional video... About job creation (sorry for the sarcasm): if usefulness is not so important my proposal would be to give shovels to two people - person A digs a hole and person B fills up the same hole at the same time. The good thing about this is that you can increase the number of jobs created simply by handing out more shovels.

nice story, especially on the idea of using the lenin statue and lamp post shadows to determine the trajectory of the asteroid

Latest update: the European Space Agency says their experts "confirm there is no link between the meteor incidents in Russia and asteroid 2012DA14 flyby tonight". How did they find this? As they did not see this one coming, how could they come to that conclusion that early!

yes, now i get my 100% certainty with the reconstructed orbits nothing else (http://wiki.nasa.gov/cm/blog/Watch%20the%20Skies/posts/post_1361037562855.html) ... I still think that esa anouncemement was highly premature but with a high probability of being right...

Some more results on the topic (link to an arxiv article inside): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21579422

"The latest idea comes from engineers at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde who suggest that a swarm of laser-wielding satellites could nudge Earth-bound asteroids off their collision course.... One proposed deflection technique involves using lasers to pulverize the surface of the asteroid, ejecting tiny bits of rock that would act as a propellant and push it onto a different course."

The atom may not be a planetary system, but under specific circumstances it can behave like one. That is the curious finding of physicists in Austria and the US, who have confirmed a 1994 prediction that, in the presence of an applied electromagnetic field, electrons in very highly energized atomic states should behave like the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter.

Bohr's model finally not so wrong?

Nice... Now I have a lame question: after you have discovered ~500k asteroids, all moving (I assume more or less) chaotically in that asteroid belt, how do you tell one from another?

That's what I thought but when presented as a green "goo" in the video, it appears rather unordered... so I guess this is just an impression evoked by a not-to-scale presentation?

It depends... orbits can be chaotic if the orbital period is in a resonance with Jupiter, although such orbits are not stable. Such configurations tend to get disrupted pretty quickly (in cosmic terms :P) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkwood_gap

This paper introduces a novel deflection approach based on nuclear explosions: the nuclear cycler. The idea is to combine the effectiveness of nuclear explosions with the controllability and redundancy offered by slow push methods within an incremental deflection strategy. The paper will present an extended model for single nuclear stand-off explosions in the proximity of elongated ellipsoidal asteroids, and a family of natural formation orbits that allows the spacecraft to deploy multiple bombs while being shielded by the asteroid during the detonation.

From slashdot

In his last dispatch from the recent AIAA Global Space Exploration Conference, veteran astronaut and PM contributor Tom Jones argues for NASA to undertake a mission to snare a nearby small asteroid and tow it into the orbit of the moon.

Probably related to the former ACT study on asteroid spin-up and the YORP effect.

NASA's new crowdsourcing initiative to find asteroid threats.

"Researchers hope the minute particles are from the asteroid"