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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eltab" data-source="post: 7486290" data-attributes="member: 6803337">Flying up to the Really Big Rock and doing a Superman trick sounds like a bit of a cliché.  (Let her best friend tell her so.)  Let's make her smart and clever as well as tough.She wants to plant a motor on the asteroid and let THAT push it off collision course.  This could be a solar sail (very fragile thing provides very low-G push over a very long time) or a Saturn V moon rocket (tough robust structure provides high-G push over a short time).  Either way, she does the math and realizes she must go NOW.  Her friends, the parts suppliers, &c all think there's plenty of time no hurry.  If she proposes the solar sail and shows the physics but everybody blows her off because they watched Armageddon as kids and now they think a moon rocket full of nukes will do the job, we set up that everybody acknowledges the seriousness of the situation but not the urgency.  That allows some people to change their minds and help her out once they think it through."Victory" for Our Heroine may be that she breaks up the Really Big Rock into several smaller parts that mere mortals can handle, plus a lot of gravel and fragments that make a very spectacular meteor shower as they burn up on re-entry.  This may look too much like that old movie, though...As the writer you can align everything as you want.  The asteroid is arriving from a direction such that, if you push it to one side enough, the Moon's gravity does some more of the work for her.  (Hmmm, her computer simulations account for the Moon's gravity but the official simulation doesn't; she finds out the Asteroid is going to hit THIS time, not NEXT time, it crosses Earth's orbit.  Must hurry!)Or … the incoming Really Big Rock is actually a Really Big Iceball (comet).  If you can make only one side melt, the natural jets (which normally create the tail and halo) will push it off its original course.  The solar sail can perform double duty IF it is in place early enough and can be installed in the right position.Our Heroine may have to hack NASA's supercomputers along the way, to figure out how to place the sail so all the physics tricks can work together.</blockquote>

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