China plans to push an asteroid
The main goal of NASA's Deep Impact mission was to knock free primordial materials from the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 that could unlock the secret of how life formed on Earth.
China's mission would instead be mainly aimed at protecting the planet from being hit by a comet or asteroid, Zhao said, referring to the kind of doomsday scenario shown in the 1998 film "Deep Impact", for which the U.S. spacecraft was named.
As opposed to NASA's "impacting" method, China would use a "more clever" method that could be called "pasting", he said, explaining the plan was to soft-land a craft with an engine capable of pushing a comet or asteroid off a collision course.
China with it's own Prometheus project?
That next sentence sounds like a mistranslation in the article.
Zhao said he and other astronomers at the Nanjing Zijinshan Observatory in eastern China had tracked more than 700 space rocks potentially on track to hit the Earth by the end of June.