Undergraduate devises strategy for defending Earth from cometary impacts -- Astronomy Now

Zhang’s award-winning work, and the focus of his aforementioned paper, examines the potential use of directed energy for comet deflection. Adapting and applying in a new way technology developed at UCSB by Lubin and his group for planetary defence against asteroids, and for relativistic spacecraft propulsion for interstellar flight, the undergraduate scholar demonstrated that a comet could be manipulated to mitigate a potential impact with Earth by heating it with a high-powered laser array.