MOSCOW: Russian scientists will soon meet in secret to work on a plan for saving Earth from a possible catastrophic collision with a giant asteroid in 26 years, the head of Russia’s space agency said today.

“We will soon hold a closed meeting of our collegium, the science-technical council to look at what can be done” to prevent the asteroid Apophis from slamming into the planet in 2036, Anatoly Perminov told Voice of Russia radio. “We are talking about

people’s lives,” Perminov was quoted by news agencies as telling the radio station.

“Better to spend a few hundred million dollars to create a

system for preventing a collision than to wait until it happens and hundreds of thousands of people are killed,” he said.

The Apophis asteroid measures approximately 350 metres in diameter and RIA Novosti news agency said that if it were to hit Earth when it passes nearby in 2036 it would create a new desert the size of France.

Perminov said a serious plan to prevent such a catastrophe would probably be

an international project involving Russian, European, US and Chinese space experts.

Interfax quoted him as saying that one option would be to build a new

“space apparatus” designed

solely for the purpose of diverting Apophis from a collision course with Earth safely.

“There won’t be any nuclear explosions,” Perminov said.

“Everything will be done according to the laws of physics. We will examine all of this.”

In a statement dated from October and

posted on its website, the US space agency NASA said new calculations

on the path of Apophis indicated “a significantly reduced likelihood of a hazardous encounter with Earth in 2036.”

“Updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a-million,” NASA said.

RIA Novosti said the asteroid was expected to pass within 30,000 kilometres of Earth in 2029 — closer than some geo-stationary satellites — and could shift course to hit Earth seven years years after that.

Perminov wouldn’t disclose any details of the project, saying they still need to be worked out. But he said the mission wouldn’t require any nuclear explosions.

Hollywood action films

“Deep Impact” and “Armageddon,” have featured space missions scrambling to avoid catastrophic collisions.

In both movies space crews use nuclear bombs in an attempt to prevent collisions.

“Calculations show that it’s possible to create a special purpose spacecraft within the

time we have, which would help avoid the collision without destroying it (the asteroid) and without detonating any nuclear charges,” Perminov said.

“The threat of collision can be averted.” Boris Shustov, the director of the Institute of Astronomy under the Russian Academy of Sciences, hailed Perminov’s statement as a signal that officials had come to recognize the danger posed by asteroids.

“Apophis is just a symbolic example, there are many other dangerous objects we know little about,” he said, according to RIA Novosti news agency.