Ragnarök: The End Of A World

It's just another day at Lowell Observatory, Arizona until Amy, one of the astrophysicists on duty, notices something on a computer screen that shouldn't be there.  It's an asteroid, a Near-Earth Object, and its orbit trajectory will lead it to collide with Earth.

 

And it's as big as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

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NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office springs into action with three potential solutions - detonating an explosive device near the asteroid to break it up into smaller, less dangerous chunks, firing lasers to heat up and vaporize the space rock enough to change its orbital path, or sending a spacecraft to slam into the asteroid, knocking it off its trajectory.

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Nations rally round to help ensure humankind's survival and a project to build a kinetic impact rocket gets underway. However, there are forces at work that want to prevent the launch of the rocket and write humankind's death warrant.. What are these forces and, perhaps more importantly, why would they want to sabotage the plan to save Earth? Is Earth doomed?