A team of researchers in the US have presented a plan to use lasers powered by sun to destroy any asteroids that come too close to Earth.

Researchers from University of California, Santa Barbara, and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo proposed a plan for solar powered space defences that can be used to vaporise asteroid in 60 minutes. They said that the defences system would be able to destroy ten times larger asteroids and the evaporation would start at greater distances from the planet.

The system called, Directed Energy Solar Targeting of Asteroids an exploRation or DE-STAR, is a practical solution to negate the risks posed by such asteroids and comets to the Earth like the one that flew from near the Earth on Friday night.

They described DE-STAR as directed energy orbital defence system, which can get its energy from the sun and convert it into massive phased array of laser beams that can be aimed at asteroids that poses risk to the planet. DE-STAR system might also be useful in other areas like a spaceship propulsion system, according to the researchers.

Gary Hughes, a professor at Cal Poly, who contributed to the research said, "This system is not some far-out idea from Star Trek. All the components of this system pretty much exist today. Maybe not quite at the scale that we'd need - scaling up would be the challenge - but the basic elements are all there and ready to go."