Spacecraft near Jupiter can not be controlled in real time from Earth. Commands from earth would be sent by radio and travel at the speed of light... travel time is 43 minutes.
Harris says "if Russia or China had this information, they wouldn't protect their own interests?", implying that U.S. has kept information about the asteroid secret. It is a protocol that the Space is beyond politics and beyond regional boundaries, so all astronomical agencies of the earth share information with other agencies across the countries. U.S. is bound to share such crucial information with all the countries that are in the dark that their 1 billion citizens are going to get killed. It is also odd that no other scientist in any other country has so far not located the killer asteroid independently.
Dr Strauss had planned to impact IO probe on the asteroid from the side away from the earth, that will give the asteroid pieces even higher momentum to fall on the earth, thus causing more damage. He could easily have changed the direction of the impact so that the IO probe comes in between the earth and asteroid and then strikes the asteroid sending broken pieces away from earth. This guy is a surely a shrink doctor.
Dr Straus's table showed that some 2.989 crore people will die in Nepal due to broken pieces of the asteroid following on the earth. The population of Nepal was 2.76 crore in 2017, that means the entire population of Nepal will die plus some more will die. That is not possible.
Dr Strauss says that the falling pieces of the asteroid will miss the western hemisphere "completely", yet he shows massive deaths in countries like India, Bangladesh, Nepal, China, which are entirely in the northern hemisphere. Actually, the concept of western hemisphere has no meaning as the earth keeps on rotating on its axis, so east or west keeps on changing every hour of the day. Once the asteroid pieces start falling and shower for a day or a week, entire earth will come in front for the impact of pieces this or that time. It should have been measured in terms of northern and southern hemisphere.
They were almost giving up on analyzing million frequencies to figure out which one(s) would give thrust, so they got the last minute idea to use computer intelligence, Tess, to prioritize frequencies. They were so intelligent, so they should have known even before they had begun that it is impossible to hand analyze million frequencies so they should have started with the computer intelligence, Tess, prioritizing frequencies. It should not be a last minute brainwave, but the very foundation stone of a research.
Darius does not want the Pentagon to use the impactor to break the asteroid up, because he wants to use the EM drive to launch a probe to act as a gravity tractor to pull the asteroid off course. But if the gravity tractor can pull the whole asteroid off track, it will apply the same acceleration to the fragments of a broken asteroid, so there is no reason not to use the impactor first in case the gravity tractor never gets into position.