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NASA To Shoot Comet With Copper Projectile
Max Entropy writes: "I can't make this up, guys. NASA plans to shoot a comet with a copper missile according to this article from Reuters' Chilean bureau. It says: 'In January 2004, a rocket would launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, a spacecraft that would orbit the sun. In July 2005 the spacecraft would separate from a battery-powered, copper projectile that would collide with the comet 24 hours later at a velocity of 6 miles (10 km) per second....It would produce a crater the width of a football field and up to 100 feet (30 meters) deep.' They say that using copper will help get more accurate readings."
I suggested a similar mission element to the "Pluto Express" project several years ago. If you slam a heavy material into a solid body fast enough, you vaporize the surface and immediate subsurface layers, and heat them enough to radiate briefly as a black body. This radiation can be captured by a spectrograph, and provide an assay of the materal present.
I doubt this really has much to do with the art of deflecting comets, but certainly that could be a side benefit of the real experiment.
A comet, being an active body, is not a good target for an automated lander. Too much can go wrong in an automated descent and the rount trip light time is generally too long to do anything about issues which arise.
A passive impactor is much more likely to succeed.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Many reasons for this experiment... but the most obvious one is this:
NASA is run by men.
I mean, come on! What guy reading this article didn't get a hard-on at the idea of, basically, slamming a volkswagon beetle travelling 20 000mph into solid rock? This is way fucking better than dropping old computer monitors from the top of a building, shooting old hard drives with armour-piercing bullets or taking a sledgehammer to the laser printer!
Now, if *women* were running NASA, we'd have all sorts of namby-pamby cuddling stuff. Blast hell out of a comet? Dear, no, let's capture it and bring it back to earth! Smash a comet that's going to strike the earth? My, my, no! Let's attach booster rockets to it, and redirect the poor thing!
Rock on, NASA! Beat shit outta stuff for us -- just make sure you take lotsa pictures!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
First, just to make sure we all know this: The primary purpose of this mission is to determine the interior composition of the comet. Any ballistics experiments are just useful side effects.
For the environmentalists - remember that this comet is going to boil away into nothingness in a few million years anyways.
Secondly, this is important to The Rest Of Us because we hope to be *mining* objects like this some day. Small objects in the solar system tend to fall into one of only a handful of composition categories, and this probe will let us get good prospecting data on one such category.
After testing it on the comet, Nasa plans on using this technology to properly remove Janet Reno from office.
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If we were to relocate the moon such that it wound up impacting with Mars, we'd be worrying about a LOT more than just a few rock fragments that would eventually reach us. I for one would be worrying about:
:) science fiction show on TV. Go SPACE-1999 - I always wanted an Eagle to ride to school in :)
1. Hey, where did that big glowing thing in the sky go?
2. They used *how much* force to do that?
3. Why is the earth wobbling in its orbit?
4. Where did all the tides go?
Mind you, this didn't stop Gerry Anderson making a rather neat (for the 70's
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
" from the cupid-should-be-so-equipped dept "
Um ... yes ... I'm sure he would want to shoot a crater the size of a football field where two people were a moment ago.
"Darling, it felt like the earth moved..."
"It did."
I call on all slashdotters to join the protest against the unjust targeting of high speed probes against such innocent planatery bodies as mars, and this commet.
On the other hand its nice to see nasa planning a mission where they _deliberatly_ crash probes as opposed to what usually happens..
Official GOD FAQ.
The most obvious one is pretty simple: There are a lot of near-earth asteroids, and a armageddon-like one is actually not all that improbable. By playing with a comet like this, NASA can determine a few things
a) Can we shoot a comet with a rocket
b) what kind of damage can we expect the rocket to do
c) weither or not firing a nuke at an asteroid is a viable option in a armageddon senario
d) how much money we can spend on weird crap and get away with it
I'm only partially joking about d.
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Desperation is a stinky cologne
Actually, there's an amazingly charitable basis behind NASA's actions. Read on to learn what these champions of Universal Matter Suffrage are really up to.
Every day, over 400 metric tons of matter are shamelessly ripped from their peaceful trajectories and deposited on the Earth. This has been happening for billions of years, without any consideration whatsoever for the wishes and general well-being of the matter in question. We understand today that all space rocks have an inherent and fundamental right to exist free of unwanted interference from outside influences, and for the first time in our history, we are actually taking steps to end this brutality.
Now, if NASA can glean enough information from this comet collision, it stands a chance of being able to develop systems to prevent the Earth from enslaving these 400 tons of previously free-drifting, independant matter. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize the ramifications of their endeavors.
NASA's hope is that by sacrificing some matter one one comet, they can hopefully prevent countless other cases of senseless, unseen matter abuse. It was a decision they did not come to lightly, but rest assured, NASA is taking every step it can to stop the Earth's rampant interference in the workings of the universe once and for all.
Fnord.
information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Nuclear physicists quite routinely ask the government for extremely large amounts of money to build an accelerator out of exotic materials, just to smash something. Sounds like NASA wants to get into that game. 8-)
Seriously, they want to see what's inside the comet. The surface doesn't seem stable enough to land a drilling rig, and it's probably not safe to even fly near the comet (pieces keep breaking off). So instead, you shoot a hole in it from a safe distance.
Why copper? The projectile materials are going to show up in the readings, so you use something that is quite unlikely to actually be in there to start with. Not iron, that's a common component of rocks. You don't use platinum or uranium because their presence in the comet even in minute quantities would be quite interesting. You don't use lead because sometimes lead traces are a product of the radioactive decay of uranium, and so you need to measure the ratio of lead to uranium if possible. Copper is the most reasonably priced dense metal left.