Slashdot Mirror
HOW-TO: Asteroid -> Strategic Weapon
Beatlebum writes "A TEAM of British space scientists has devised a plan to nudge an asteroid out of its solar orbit and send it hurtling into the centre of a British Town. The story posted in the Electronic Telegraph describes how a few small atomic blasts could change a comet's trajectory enough to make it crash to any point on earth. The impact of even a small asteroid would make an ICBM look like a firecracker."
why does this sound a lot like the moon april fools joke, although this one sounds a whole lot more convincing.
Why do you assume the velocity of the Asteroid to be the earth's escape velocity? This is the velocity required to leave the earth - the relative velocity of the Asteroid and the Earth are what is important, and possibly much higher than this. The higher the velocity, the lower the mass required on the asteroid. But then, IANAAP :)
this is a way for the researchers to get a military size budget by pretending asteroids are weapons. the article says it takes 15 nukes to move an asteroid with the explosive power of 15 nukes. there is no point. asteroids are extremely rare.
If there is a positive effect to discovering this 'new' weapon... at least the resulting blast doesn't irradiate the counrtyside, just lots of dust, heat, and debris.
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Don Rude - AKA - RudeDude
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
Crazy because who the hell would spend the money it would cost to pull this off just to eradicate one city? A well placed biological warhead would have the same effect of wiping out the population while leaving the structures intact for the invading force. With prevailing winds and such and enough of the agent you could wipe out a continent in a matter of days. So much for "mastermind" terrorists. I mean, have a little finesse guys. Filling a god damned truck with fertilizer and blowing up a building is chickenshit. If you really want to become a Bond villain you need to wipe out at least 200 million people at once. ;-)
This is actually very easy to postulate, but the actual implementation of this would wind up looking like a huge game of Pong. If two countries were trying to get this to hit each other, they would blast it back and forth, constantly changing the trajectory of the asteroid similar to the known universe's largest ping-pong ball with a catch, the asteroid could eventually explode and we'd all be in trouble.
Look on the bright side. India and Pakastan wouldn't be using it anytime soon on each other, unless they both want to go careening into the Indian Ocean.
Secret windows code
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
It's the new arms race! WWIII will be a billards game played out in space!
from even earlier, remember Star Blazers? Remember the Gammalons?
Remember Planet Bombs?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
well, seeing as how England is an ISLAND, it's more likely that they'll hit some water nearby.
Big ol splash. Could possibly give Bath a Bath.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
well, if they did their presentation on power-point, maybe we need to be afraid. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
slamming a comet into mars with enough water to be useful would also likely bring enough atmospheric dust to be a nuisance for a period of time longer than it would take for the water to sublime, and molecules to be blown out of the upper atmosphere by the solar wind.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Finding the center of mass of an asteroid is easy.
Asteroid rotate around their center of mass. Even if your asteroid wasn't rotating asteroids have very densities, so you anyone who took first year calculus can find the center of mass of an asteroid of known shape.
I assume these scientists were inspired by watching Babylon 5. Mass drivers can be fun!
The proposed mission puts 20 or so small nukes into independent orbits around the asteroid. I imagine the controlling processors would learn its exact mass profile pretty quickly. They also use a whole series of nudges to get it on target. The whole process takes a couple of years, so there no hurry.
The only real problem would be if the asteroid turned out not to be solid enough to deflect in one piece.
Read the article. The scenario envisaged is an unmanned launch disguised as a Mars or similar mission. This is "lost" and makes a rendezvous with the asteroid where it unloads 20 or so small nukes into orbits around the asteroid (ideally an otherwise unidentified one about 100m across). The nukes are used to alter the orbit of the asteroid, exploding when the sun is between Earth and the asteroid, leaving just one final course correction to be done in the final month of so before impact, shifting it from a near-miss to a collision.
In their simulations an average of 15 blasts was enough to hit a medium sized city.
Once the final blast is done, it could probably be nudged into a nearby ocean or something up to the last few days, but a hitherto unsuspecting opponent would probably not be able to launch a nuke beyond Earth orbit (an ICBM will not do) fast enough to do this themselves.
Budget, less than 100 billion $ for the first one, much less for subsequent ones.
Now, instead of "The Bomb" a rival country could be considered a threat if they have "The Asteroid".
The Mobile Suit Gundam anime series had the orbital breakaway state of Jion dropping asteroids on earth cities, and that came out back in the late 70's/80's.
Speaking of B5, MS Gundam also took a big O'Neil type colony, filled it with CO2, and turned it into a superlaser. Very cool, at least when it's safely ficticious.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
it's a bit of a streach to think a nuclear nudge on an astroid can be so precisely done as to hit a specific point on earth - I'm think of chaos theory and sensitivity to initial conditions - you get one hundreth of a newton-meter off in the wrong direction and instead of hitting Chicago you hit Paris - try apologizing for that one.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
but oh the collateral damage - Say London wants to take out ******, The Brits should at least expect some climatic changes to their island.
Think of MAD in terms of what makes people drive safely on the highways - it isn't traffic laws that prevent someone from bashing into you at 100 km/hr.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Of course, with our luck, MS will bribe all the right people and send the meteor to San Jose. Good bye Sun, most of Cisco and Intel, Linus Torvalds, and a whole bunch of other threats to Microsoft's power.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
It doesn't take a nuclear rocket scientist to know that this stuff is capable of destroying whole countries.
And it doesn't take a geologist to know that the world is flat, or a biologist to know that maggots spontaneously generate from rotting meat.
As for the former, the Castle Bravo test literally destroyed the island in question and left nothing but a huge crater in its place.
That island was somewhat smaller than North America.
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Yes, there is a middle man that can be cut out. However, said middle man would (if the guys employing it were lucky) be completely unexpected--if its orbit isn't precisely known or monitored. (Which is one reason it's being proposed by Spaceguard: the funding aspect.)
I mean, with the shadow of MAD still looming large in the public imagination, who is going to expect a non-nuclear attack of that magnitude?
-W-
"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
I'm quite impressed with this work, not because it draws out a plan for using asteroids as weapons, but because it can offer a somewhat more compelling reason for governments to fund research into 'killer asteroids'.
Face it, if astronomers say that something's got a one-in-a-million chance of hitting us, or that it passes within 600,000 miles of Earth, it lacks a certain kick--it's just astronomy, and that isn't a top priority. However, if they successfully argue that the Other Guy(s) could use these things as weapons, the issue becomes one of national defense. National defense gets funded.
Of course, one has to make a good scientific case first. I'm waiting for an actual paper before deciding how plausible it actually is--though no matter what, it's still an interesting idea.
-W-
"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
Since current theories regarding the mass die out of the dinosaurs seem to revolve around a collision of either a comet or asteroid with the Earth, one's got to wonder if these geniuses have ever heard of the term Mutually Assured Destruction.
Geez...
(Someone please tell me that this is an April Fool's joke that someone just found underneath a pile of magazines.)
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
no asteroid explodes on impact.
no asteroid has tons of explosive materials in them (Ok, maybe a purely sodium asteroid would be messy hitting an ocean)
There is no explosion.
There is just a massive exchange of intertial force and many times asteroids if not on a 90 degree angle to the target will bounce or graze the target. (several grazing scars are in south america)
Yes, a direct impact of something the size of New-york would probably cause some decent damage. but a BUS sized one would not. Mir was larger than a BUS and has nuclear reactors on it. Granted it did not enter the atmosphere at 9000 times the speed of sound (and nither does most metorites)
run an impact simulation.. the "disaster" is not as bad as people make it out to be.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well... At least this will solve the Middle East Conflict once and for all. No more whose is the holy city question to fight about.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Why asteroid. Kinetic harpoons which are a recent hit in some british sci fi will do nicely.
All you need is a high polar orbit platform. Minor orbit correction, and a delivery vehicle detaches and starts to deccelerate. After it has deccelerated enough it launches several properly shaped tungsten charges proteced by ceramics or composite material so that they can be slammed into the ground at proper speed without burning in the atmosphere. They hit the ground preheated to melting temperature and flying at several kilometers per second.
Precise when used versus stationary targets.
Deadly.
No fallout.
Very low maintenance costs once the platform launched. The platform if it is in polar orbit can hit any place on the globe within 24 hours. 12 platforms can cover the entire globe within the requirements of a tactical strike.
Yummy...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The slashdot story freely mixes the terms "comet" and "asteroid", even though the two things are totally different objects. Both would suck to get hit by, and they both live in space, but that's where the similarities stop. Please at least try to keep these things straight.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
>ABC-weapons are already pretty good at killing lots of people, and they are easy to get. Heck, even India & Pakistan got nukes. How about the Taleban? How about you? Get yours today!
...
This song by Tom Lehrer (from THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS) seems an appropriate respose to this comment
"Who's Next"
One of the big news items of the past year concerned the fact that China, which we call 'Red China', exploded a nuclear bomb, which we called a 'device'. Then Indonesia announced that it was gonna have one soon, and proliferation became the word of the day. Here's a song about that.
First we got the bomb and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's o.k.,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way!
Who's next?
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side, I believe.
China got the bomb, but have no fears;
They can't wipe us out for at least five years!
Who's next?
Then Indonesia claimed that they
Were gonna get one any day.
South Africa wants two, that's right:
One for the black and one for the white!
Who's next?
Egypt's gonna get one, too,
Just to use on you know who.
So Israel's getting tense,
Wants one in self defense.
"The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb!
Who's next?
Luxembourg is next to go
And, who knows, maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb!
Who's next, who's next, who's next?
Who's next?
We have all seen Armageddon, I think. What would be the impact on the rest of us?
or...
"We will destroy your town with an Asteroid, unless you pay us...
ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!"
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
because thats a fucking good idea.
we *need* weapons more powerful than a thermonuclear warhead... not until we can explode an entire planet in one shot will we be ready...
oh wait, no, we should find a way to induce supernovae, eyah, then we can destroy whol solar systems at a time! Humans shall rule the galaxy!
goddamn i hate people.
-k-
Look, guys, if you're gonna go to all the trouble of shoving asteroids around, just slip a small nickel-iron one, say a billion tons or so, into a lagrange orbit for me, would you?
L2 would be nice, but even L5 would do.
Oh, and if you run across any chondrites, bring 'em along, by all means. It would make things so much easier...
Thanks -
The doc
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
Is it me or is there one big mother of a middle man that can be cut out of the equation here?
Yeah, but think of the style points you would get...
So fifteen nukes go off on an asteroid, and shortly afterwards it hits Telford. I don't think this'll fool all of the people all of the time.
Mr Holloway, who works on risk assessment at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, likened the approach to one of a bad golfer.
So an asteroid strike would make vast areas of land inaccessable for the masses? How is that like golf?
the fact that asteroids aren't perfect spheres. In fact, they're pretty far from being ANY perfect shape. They're probably not of uniform density, either. Add to that the fact that it's probably rotating unevenly, and you have one hell of an unpredictable rock floating through the cosmos.
Finding the center of mass in an arbitrary asteroid and then finding a way to nuke the precise point on it's surface isn't going to be something you can calculate easily with a computer program; you're gonna need to go to the asteroid you pick, study it for a while and THEN experiment a little with changing it's trajectory. All this before you're ready to aim it at Earth and *maybe* hit your target.
I suspect the article linked to is meant to be read as tongue-in-cheek, just like the one a few weeks ago on using asteroids to change Earth's orbit when the sun starts expanding.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
. . . or perhaps it's a subterfuge: the real target may be France
And very importantly, you can destroy a nuke before it explodes, and it doesn't go off, you destroy an asteroid, well it may help some.
The only rational assumption can be that this is a trial run to ensure that they can land an asteroid *directly* on target next time, when they choose to wipe Slough off the face of this green and pleasant land.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Arachnoid intelligence spy ships have learned of the human's latest desctructive technologies via an internet source named "slashdot".
They have also learned that an unnamed insect on the planet was involved in a mid-air collision with a terrestrian "fly-swatter" combat unit, located in the "oval office" in the earthling city of washington
The arachnoids are demanding an apology, lest they unleash a torrent of asteroids on washington.
Although a majority of humans think this would be a good idea, President Dubba refuses to apologize, stating that the insect was "a hostile un-friendly, whose perpetration was to bug me"
The federation's minister of Retalliatory Arachnoid and Insect Death (RAID) has decalered War on Bugs.
Citizens everywhere are signing up to help defend planet.
Want to know more?
adrien
Point and Grunt
I can here it now...Stu-pid! Stu-pid! Stu-pid! ... You get the point.
There ain't no way in bloody freakin' hell they can target this thing with enough accuracy to make it worth their while. One innocently slipped decimal place or one graduate student intern using the wrong unit of measure and the asteroid you intended for the Presidential Palace in Baghdad lands in the Knesset.
Code commentary is like sex.
If it's good, it's VERY good.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
This does sound like a Bond villian scheme, specifically like Octopussy. I do think it bears pointing out the other advantage of this scheme. You use 15 small nukes to get the equivalent of 15 very large nukes. If you know this is coming you can covertly prepare to protect your government. Whilst, most US citizens would rather see their government severely disrupted, this may not be true for the rest of the world. (No, they'd all like to see the US government disrupted too.)
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Seconded! Now if only there wasn't such a lead-time I'd suggest a few other places to wipe out.
Milton Keynes. West Midlands (ALL of it). Basingstoke. Bracknell.
Come on kids, join in! It's fun to destroy towns...
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Sadly, this was the most believable part of the entire book.
One to skip... Oh, and "Moonseed" too. "Voyage" isn't bad though (as the first in his "let's reuse existing space hardware" series which you have to admit isn't nearly as snappy a title as his previous "Xeelee Sequence" novels)
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
I think you're right. Also I think there's an error in the original story.
In most articles on the subject, the adjective "small" is not found anywhere near the quantifier "1 megaton"....
(megaton-class Nukes tend to be fusion hence expensive and big. "tactical" nukes which are smaller and lighter and pure fission or fission-boosted are in the 10-500 *Kilo*ton range).
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I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
I think that the rock would be as hazardous as a real nuke... after all, you're setting off 15 nukes within a few hundred yards of it... surely some of that radiation has to soak into the rock. I mean, i'm far from a nuclear scientist or astrophysicist, but it seems reasonable to suppose that this approach would be no less detrimental than using a real nuke.
you have to rachet it up a bit.
So some scientist tried to scare the public into diverting more funds into their pet projects. The public said, "Ho-hum. More Chicken Littles proclaiming that the sky is falling." So the scientist try a publicity stunt.
"I know what we can do, Dr. Bubba. Let's do some math that very few of the people understand that'll show how we can use nukes to alter the path of an asteroid so that it'll blow up an insignificant little town. That'll scare the bejeesus out of 'em fer sure."
"But Dr. Dufus, we don't have the technology to target asteroids. Remember, if it were that easy, we could just deflect them when they got close enough to be noticed."
"Yeah, you're right. But remember, people are DUMB. They'll never notice if we put enough equations and other mathy stuff into the presentation. Then we could do this neat graphical thing where a space shuttle has to blow up because the nukes don't do their job right."
"You're right. Let's do it, Dufus."
Nothing to see here but some scientist who aren't getting their pet projects funded trying to scare up some support.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
By Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.. at amazon.com
(Pardon my speculation as to the content of the article; at the present time it is inaccessible to me). Using nuclear weapons to guide asteroids and comets is an interesting idea, but the choice of using it for warmaking is odd. From a practical sense, the object would be far from "stealthy;" an intense X-ray source emmanating from a chunk of sky would almost certainly be detected, given our current capability, and it would tell us exactly where to look. We'd certainly wonder about that object coming towards us, especially when it changes course en route to Earth.
Any state with the technological savvy and nuclear arsenal to conduct such an activity would be able to dispose of its enemies in another fashion, and its enemies no doubt could dispose of the aggressor. (If not, then more conventional modes of attack could be used by the aggressor with greater precision, flexibility, and lower cost). Besides, the number of possible adversaries a target state would have that could conduct such a mission is very limited, so the target state would know full well who lofted a big snowball at them, and they would merely respond in kind prior to impact with whatever arsenal they had available. The only real use I can see for such a technology is to somehow coordinate it with a first-strike nuclear attack, with the big space rock knocking out hard targets such as underground command centers.
An alternative, peaceful use for such a technology would be to bring resources such as H2O to places we'd like to colonize. Slam a comet into the moon or Mars to bring water there, for example. Unlike trying to precisely control the descent of a chunk of ice onto Earth, a dicey game at best, one could instead direct the comet toward a different celestial body and have a much larger margin of error.
I'm reminded of an article I read on nuclear launch systems a while back. When the guys in the silo turn the key, the missiles launch, right?
Wrong. It sends launch codes to the missile, and those launch codes might say "go now," but they could also tell the missile to wait minutes, hours, days, years, even indefinitely. (The last would allow a single pod to launch them in the future, instead of the multiple pods required for the first launch command.)
The rationale is to provide a "second strike" capacity - the missiles will be launched when the enemy is attempting to rebuild the military base, etc. Evem if your launch crew is all dead, those missiles will launch.
An asteroid strike would be a very compelling second-strike weapon. Silos could be destroyed, blocked, disarmed, etc. But the asteroid-tweaking mission could be launched during the initial exchange and then it's out of reach until impact.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Someone in telford is gonna have one heck of a surprize in 2023....
Dr Holloway:
"What? The asteroid is still heading towards Telford? I though we cancelled that in 2015?? I better make a few phone calls...."
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Interesting article, but what made me laugh is the image with photos of "attractions" (like the "Dinosaur Valley") that could be lost in Tretford. For a second, you may think it's not such a bad idea. :-)
"It is more complicated than you think" (The Eighth Networking Truth from RFC 1925)
"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein details the exact same idea except that it was launching rocks from the moon instead of diverting asteroids from orbit. How is this concept new? The book was written in 1966. It's all about the gravity well. Definite high school physics.
zor_prime
The abbreviated Laws of Thermodynamics:
1)You can't win.
2)You can't break even.
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." -Mark Twain
Chunking asteroids (well, big Moon rocks, but you get the point) at the Earth was mentioned by Robert Heinlein in his 1966 book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
That would only be true if the asteroid was initially sitting motionless in space in relation to Earth's reference frame. Otherwise it'll have some kick-ass initia to add to the equation.
You'd destroy one of the most politically confusing parts of the world, and probably one of those which has caused the most bloodshed across the world. It'd probably make things a lot simpler.
What would the various sects argue about then?
Whose god destroyed Jerusalem, and thus who needed to be killed/attacked/persecuted this week.
Small nuclear does not necessarily mean hydrogen. Actually, it probably means a small FISSION bomb (aka atomic), which is completely different, much easier to make, and a helluva lot cheaper/smaller.
The amount of available nuclear bombs is still large enough to destroy the Earth ~10,000 times. A single H-Bomb can destroy whole countries and make them uninhabitable for years.
H-Bombs are evil, but this is FUD. Nuclear weapons can make areas of land inhabitable, and will dramatically affect the land for years - but the odds of a nuclear conflict that actually reduced the earth to ashes are completely improbable. Cities are the only targets that nuclear weapons effectively destroy - that, and perhaps large dams (think three gorges and the hoover dam). There's some doubt there too. There's little military strategic value in blowing up land nobody lives on, after you've wiped out all the cities.
Contrast this with a large asteroid. The resulting firestorm would burn everything on the planet that -could- burn. Humans just wouldn't be extincted, but probably everything more complicated than inscects and small rodents. There's no radiation of course (unless the asteroid was a block of uranium, which I find unlikely). Even then.
Then there's biological and chemical weapons. A genetically engineered virus, with the right incubation time, could kill us all in a couple of weeks.
Again, FUD. Biological and Chemical weapons are a particular pet peeve of mine, and my government (Canada) is no exception to the rule here - it absolutely disgusts me that people would invest time and (MY) tax dollars in developing stockpiles of nerve gas and biological weapons that serve NO defensive purpose - they're only offensive. Chemical and biological weapons are possibly some of the worst, more horrible ways to die that we've come up with, but even then, they're not going to kill us all. They'll just kill everyone in cities and urban areas, with developed nations the hardest hit.
Contrast with Mr. Asteroid - a good impact will, in one fell swoop, probably take out a continent! A whole continent! Unimaginable energies!
Ah well.. the only thing that will wake people up is a small asteroid taking out a major center (preferably American, because that's the only country with the resources to do anything). :)
..don't panic
Racist scum. No wonder your country is so fucked up. We've moved beyond judging people on their physical appearance, maybe you should try that to.
Nor does it take a nuclear rocket scientist to realize that blast and radiation damage don't scale linearly with megatonnage.
Yes, Tsar Bomba was 100MT. No, even the Russians didn't make it part of their arsenal, because it cost a bloody fortune to build, and didn't do much more damage than a 25MT bomb.
With 1960s-era guidance systems, you needed large bombs to ensure that you took out the target, because you couldn't be sure your bomb would hit the target to within $BIGNUM radius.
With 2000-era guidance systems, you can hit the target, and you therefore no longer need to dump anywhere near the same amount of explosive power onto the target to take it out.
The future of warfare is precision munitions. Even for hardened targets, a penetrating warhead and a conventional load (or for soft targets, a big-ass FAE - fuel-air-explosive) can be far more effective than either a tac-nuke (multi-kiloton) or big-ass nuke (multi-megaton) device.
The target's destroyed - the fact that there's no fallout issue with precision-guided conventional munitions is just one hell of a nice fringe benefit for your troops.
Nukes kick ass. But for the most part, they're obsolete except as a deterrent. They have a place in the arsenal, but the generals - from any nation - are aware that there are almost always better (cheaper and more effective) ways of accomplishing the mission.
If you want to worry about something, fear the rogue state that builds a basement nuke, or worse, chemical/biological weapons (e.g. the possibility that foot-and-mouth disease being a possible instance of bioterrorism or asymmetrical warfare). The nuclear arsenals of the superpowers are the least of your worries.
The first man that made 'er
Was an Engineer, of course
But then a bloody asteroid
Squished Godiva's horse?
Stories like this make me want to go out and kill those asshole scientists who think up shit like this. Oh, damn it, now there I go.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
The key to the article is they propose doing it in 2023 with a ten ton satellite. Its not like, this is happening tomorrow so you better watch out.
It would be funny if these assholes missed a couple of calculations and hit something other than their proposed target (an actual town). This is complete BS, if they wanted to do it, they would be going for a spot in the ocean, not in a highly populated world power.
Not gonna happen
Troll Like a Champion Today
The difference is that the rock leaves a lot less radiation I think. but I could be completely wrong...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Anybody who has read Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" would have heard about this a long time ago. ;-)
He has a whole capture about the implications concerning both asteroid deflection and their possible use as weapons.
His solution? Well... you will have to read the book!
Ah ! You haven't read the article right.
It takes 15 1-megaton (read: SMALL) nukes to create an explosion equivalent to 15 H-bombs (read: BIIIIIIG).
No, silly. All you have to do is hit William Shatner on the head with a large rock so he loses his memory, falls in love with the Indian princess, and accidentally discovers the controls to the asteroid deflector. Sheesh. You people.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
, and anyone else not fortunate enough to have been blessed with firsthand knowledge of Telford, I urge you to support my colleagues in their goal of the destruction of this horrible & insignificant little town.
While it is true that I have friends in the area, and would not gladly see them destroyed, my duty to the world must come first. I MUST protect the human race from the contagion that is "the midlands".
I understand that the impact would produce longer range effects, the shockwave is likely to break windows as far away as Glasgow, or Tokyo if the size is misjudged, but it is worth it, believe me!
Now my friends I must be gone - to space, and to war!
DEATH TO TELFORD!
someone set up us the asteroid.
As someone pointed out, computing the ballistics for something like this would be the hard part.
;)
This type of weapon popped up in Heinlen's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"...but they had the advantage of a massive intelligent computer.
Stealth. A nuclear strike LOOKS like a nuclear strike, although if it's done via SSBNs the identity of the sender may not be immediately obvious. An asteroid strike... may look like a fluke hit. You'd have to choose one that NO astronomer has been watching (because they AREN'T supposed to just change course radically...), but...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
-----
crazy dynamite monkey
If propulsion systems are well camauflaged no one would likely notice this until too late. Of course you would have to calculate a nice compromise between destructive power and reprocussions for the rest of the earth (don't wanna end up like the dinosaurs now do we). Nice, clean, destructive to the enemy without leaving radioactive fallout for centuries... Maybe someone oughtta suggest this to Dubya., or even better, suggest it to some smaller country who maybe can afford a space program capable of launching these things, but can't afford a nuclear program....suddenly Dubya has real justification for SDI....hmmm
I think....therefore I am
I reject your reality
From the "Disperse Life" pages:
(An "inforb" is an orbit occupied by informational entities. A "biorb" is an orbit occupied by biological entities.)
The first biorb is likely to be around Earth growing out of the . It will grow Before growing far toward being heliocentric, the first biorb will need to begin the defense of Earth against celestial attacks.
Kinetic energy asteroidal weapons are the most likely technology to represent the greatest threat to Earth as a result of the growing solar biorb. Once asteroid mining begins in earnest, as it will once life becomes heliocentric, asteroids can be redirected via carefully planned celestial mechanics. Within a matter of decades, a malicious interest could send a swarm of tiny asteroids toward Earth at speeds comparable to that of the Swift Tuttle comet -- a popular candidate for global disaster scenarios. Since kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity, the important thing is to find small asteroids with the right trajectories. This would most likely be carried out on the basis of a fairly complete atlas of the trajectories of small asteroids, searching for some large number of them that could be manipulated to converge on Earth with maximum relative velocity over a fairly narrow window of time.
The most economic defense will likely be the preemptive survey, cataloging and monitoring of all celestial objects (comets as well as asteroids) large enough to survive high speed passage through Earth's atmostphere with little loss due to ablation. This means the initial prospecting for asteroidal resources will be carried out by Earth shielding entities. It is difficult to second guess the technologies that would be available for this task so far in the future, but candidate technologies are already upon us and surveys are already being done.
Perhaps the most positive aspect of this situation is that when an asteroid is identified as a threat, it is also identified as a particularly attractive source of "fuel" for space transportation. Any asteroid that has a high velocity relative to Earth, or can be easily made to have such a velocity, and which has an orbit that can be made to come near Earth, can be used as reaction mass to navigate the inner solar system. Each time this is done, the threat represented by such asteroids diminishes. It's as though someone had discovered a way to burn nuclear fuel in jets without pollution. The bombs would get burned up due to economic demand.
Additional global threats to Earth are most likely decreased by removing technological civilization from its biosphere.
Seastead this.
While I'm not one of those enviro-nuts who worry about the 1 in 1e12 chance of a satellite's plutonium powercell exploding, I am somewhat leery of the science fiction premise that we'll get tons of new raw materials from the asteroid belt or moon.
The idea is simple: go to where the iron, nickle, cadmium, and other valuable minerals are, and ship them home. There's plenty of rocks up there.
The risks are high: you're guiding rocks of important sizes towards several billion sitting ducks. "Catching" the rock in Earth orbit is just a mite riskier than guiding a broken Mir into an uninhabited stretch of ocean.
[
Anyone else think this sounds like a bad game of pool?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
So now I know why I was raised playing "Asteroids" and "Missle Command", I was unwittingly trying out to be the "Ender" of our generation.
- passion
What about a civil application of this technique. Say, if you had a massive body made from a precious resource, say, gold, and make it crash into this french pacific island where they test nuclear bombs anyway.
Well, the good thing would be that this island would finally be gone, and the bad thing would be that the asteroid would propably be somewhat radioactive when it is steered by nuclear bomb explosions.
That is a very worrying analogy :-)
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
"Now, Dr Holloway, of the astronomer pressure group Spaceguard UK, and Dr Asher, from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, have demonstrated that it is possible to turn an asteroid into a weapon." (My emphasis.)
They're trying to drum up some funding, that's all.
How are you gentlemen.
All your small English town are belong to us.
Move all 'crumpet'.
For great justice.
This parody brought to by the SBAITGFGS - Society to Beat AYB Into the Ground (For Great Justice)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Yeah but we're all wise to it now......if I ever see an asteroid that's crashed into the Earth, I'm going to check it for signs of nuclear explosion damage ;-)
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Moderator's essentials
...let me get this straight.
It would take 15 nuclear explosions to push a rock on to a collision course with Earth to create an explosion equivalent to 15 nuclear bombs.
Is it me or is there one big mother of a middle man that can be cut out of the equation here?
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Moderator's essentials
This was actually a plot point in Stephen Baxter's novel, Titan
*** SPOILER BELOW ***
In Titan a Pat Buchanan type clown gets elected president of the U.S.A. He then has the military develop a virus that targets Han Chinese. The Chinese get wind of this and retaliate by redirecting an asteroid to crash into the Atlantic Ocean. Apparently the impact not only destroys the U.S., but ends up wiping out all humanity. Oops!
Yet Another Web Site
This is an clever way to get funding for asteroid tracking , convince the generals that they're potential weapons. The asteroid arm's race will begin and asteroid observatories will be rolling in money.
I'm all for it, IMHO its a pretty good way to spend your defense dollar.
The fact it *can* be done? Although I'm sure sure that no altruistic /. reader would want to splat the UK countryside it's probably about about time that we all had that father and son (assuming females have more sense) chat about why it is not a good thing. This sort of chat has happened once before in 1978 (?) when New Scientist published the "How to build your own Nuke" article. Initially it was pooh-poohed until people realised it would work. *Then* I imagine a lot of people worked out how to detect and stop some looney from actually doing this.Can you spell Eschelon? 23 years later we are now in the same situation and some English gentlemen are pointing out to us how doable this all is. The same really applies to biological and chemical weapons. It needs to be talked about openly so people understand the real risks if some looney decides that their worldview is correct and the rest can burn in hell. Forwarned is forarmed.People just seem to underestimate risks these days and assume everyone is nice and peaceful.Yeah , right!!
Put that together, and you have another incentive for asteriod detection research. Oh, and the group that's studying this is 'the astronomer pressure group Spaceguard UK'. QED.
I'm not sure which one Niven wrote first, but in Mote in God's Eye he SPECIFICALLY explains how the Moties used atomic power to toss asteroids from the Mote system at their enemies during wars... and at some point in the Motie cycles, they had all the remaining asteroids moved far enough away from Mote Prime so they couldn't be used as weapons any longer. They even explained to the reader (through the human scientist's evaluation on how the asteroids got placed in a new orbit) exactly how it would be possible to move an asteroid to an exact trajectory. In Footfall did he get more detailed than that? Essobie
Somebody's been reading The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Jerry Pounelle (I think) wants to orbit I-Beams to drop on tanks.
Glad the engineers are catching up with the SF authors again. You don't suppose this is the latest scheme to cure the Hoof and Mouth outbreak?
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Why hairtrigger? This would work best to hurt an enemy state without being concerned about retaliation - it would look like an accident (or act of God, if you prefer).
sig fault
... but would it get rid of foot and mouth?
Another idéa is the kinetic projectiles (not sure about the spelling) in Peter F. Hamilton's Nights dawn trillogy.
Rods of a heavy material accellerated to high velocity in orbit and then pointed at the target at the surface.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
In order to prevent a meteor attack, raise chocobos until you have an ocean-going chocobo, and then summon Knights of the Round a few times!
Or perhaps Austin Powers..
In actuality, it's been suggested that rod-shaped projectiles might be better. With a lower cross-sectional area, the atmospheric friction would be less, and so the projectile might be still intact when it reaches the ground.
This was the rationale behind a project called "Thor," where the proposed material was cadmium. In one Thor package, the 20 to 25 of these rods were bundled around a de-orbiter motor (possibly a cold-gas motor; lower power and slower to de-orbit, but less thermal plume to alert the enemy) and the package would be placed in a polar orbit to provide world-wide coverage.
According to the article I read (and mind you, this was over 10 years ago and the details might have gotten fuzzy over time), a set of 10 of these packages would provide us with a possible response time of less than 2 hours before dropping one of these bundles. 100 packages in orbit would give a response time of less than 10 minutes.
I recall the article dealt with such ideas as sensors embedded in the nose of the rod (exposed after the ablative effect of the atmosphere), minimal maneuvering based on raising and lowering bumps on the back end of the rod, and terminal guidance based on color contrast, metal detection, thermal detection.
An additional aspect of this involved payloads such as sand (imagine the shock wave when sand traveling at close to escape velocity flares out into the atmosphere at ground level!), depleted uranium (good for busting through underground complexes), plus other ideas that a suitably nasty mind could envision.
It sounded convincing as hell at the time...
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
Maybe they just misspelled? Chances are they meant Helford (Rob). I dunno...
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The Heavy Gear universe does this; 40 ton rods of Titanium, I believe. Point'em and drop'em.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I guess they really want to test their weapon but it seems a little extreme to actually destroy a few of your own cities just to test a theory like this. And what if it doesn't hit the target: "oops, we hit Germany, but it was only a scientific experiment. sorry." seems like just seeing an expected change in trajectory that still didn't run into the earth would be a good enough test of theory..
Note that the original inhabitants of Bikini atoll still cannot return to their islands because of the contamination. OTOH, in Hiroshima they used to take all the schoolchildren out each year with Geiger counters to find radioactive debris from the bomb. They had to stop about 20 years ago because they couldn't find any radioactive rocks any more. The difference is between surface (or subsurface) and aerial detonations. High air bursts produce very little fallout. Surface and subsurface bursts produce enormous amounts.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
We can only hope.
Of course, if they get it into the English Channel, the resulting tidal wave would give us a nice 2-for-the-price-of-1 result....
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Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
blog |
The basic outline is that in some not-too-distant future the CIA has uncovered evidence that Russia diverted a giant asteroid onto a collision course with the USA. An elite team of astronomers must identify the asteroid - codename Nemesis - and stop it. But the key lies in the pages of a 17th-century Latin manuscript - which has gone missing.
The book is full of intrigue and was a thrilling read. In fact, the cover has this quote: "The most exciting book I have ever read" - Arthur C. Clarke.
Country A is the enemy of country B. Both are nuclear superpowers. Country A diverts asteroid X such that it will strike country B. There is no coherent meteor identification organization. Sensors pick up some atmospheric disturbance. Two and a half seconds later the asteroid impacts. Within a few minutes the shock wave has eliminated country B. Country A has removed it's greatest foe before it could even identify what happenned, let alone realizing that country A was the source. Sure, country A experiences losses and it's going to be awhile before the Earth recovers, but Country A is now the dominant superpower.
6. Redmond
If you thought that the cold war with atomic weapons would leave the Earth cold and desolate, try sending an asteroid of any size to impact. According to the people they don't let out too often, a water hit is worse than a land hit as well.
Just something to think about before people get too happy about this as a defensive/offensive device.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
ABC-weapons are already pretty good at killing lots of people, and they are easy to get. Heck, even India & Pakistan got nukes. How about the Taleban? How about you? Get yours today!
--
Does this mean that the UK has become Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada?
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
Let's all be clear. Without the US involvement in both WWI and WWII the British would be speaking German right now.
Ironically, this announcement comes at the same time as the "Space without weapons" conference being hosted by Russia.
Set up us the astroid!
_______
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
Any mention of what the impact of said asteroid would do to the Earths trajectory?
IANAL... But I play one on
great! a huge fling object hurteling twards Earth. Just what we need. now we get to worry what this impact would do to earths orbit.
"Of all the things I've Lost, I miss my mind the most." --Ozzy
So they plan to wipe out Telford on on Oct 16 2023, but "The impact would be accurate to within a few hundred miles...". So it's also very well possible that they miss England alltogether? Sounds like a good, well thought out, plan to me **chuckles**.
Yeah, I can see the apology now: "Sorry we blasted Paris away, we thought we used metric values to calculate the trajectory..."
I'm sold on the concept so far. So do they want donations to help now or what?
Good god man! Someone stop them from detroying that landmark!
All you need to do is nudge a small space rock.
This could be done with non-nuclear rockets...
An ion engine with a couple thousand pounds of fuel comes to mind. Storable, Efficent, Hard to Detect...
Remember they estimate size of the rock that caused the 1908 siberian explosion is 50 meters (1/2 a foot ball field).
Link here
Doesn't take much to change the orbit of a rock that small.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Same shit, different pile.
You retarded or something?
Besides, russia has sold nukes to pretty much everyone. Terrorists don't use icbms - trucks parked outside federal buildings / targets work quite well.
hum dee dum dum *cough*dumbass.*cough*
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Shit, pretty much anyone with one or two thousand gallons of propane can make one....
oh well..
Just bringing this up, because "tactical" nukes need not be deployed - just one detonation, (or several, if you want, you can "align" the explosions to create extreme force in some places) will do the trick - just ask the russians.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
" Give me the money or I will throw an enormous rock at your head"
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
This wasn't meant as flamebait...
If you surreptitiously nudge a rock and calmly twiddle your fingers while it augers into your target, who's your target gonna blame?
It'd be like nuking, but without the launch warning. If you don't get greedy and drop a BIG rock, there would be little (if any) warning. How many Earth-orbit crossing objects are tracked? How big are they? An incoming meteor the size of a dumpster makes a hell of a bang, but I doubt that anyone would see it coming before its too late.
MAB
In the "One World/Black Helicopters" conspiracy mode....
What would happen if you dropped a rock on Jeruselam and then got the TV hair-do evangelists to chat up the "wrath of God" angle? What would the various sects argue about then?
According to the people they don't let out too often, a water hit is worse than a land hit as well.
There is a Scientific American article about the relative damage wrought by land and sea asteroid impacts.
And they thought Hoof-and-Mouth diesase was bad for Brittish tourism...
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
1...LosAngeles
Better the pride that resides in a Citizen of the world, than the pride that devides when a colourful rag is unfurled
:) that is very inspired.
Thank you
While I think Science for Science's Sake is a very worthwhile endeavour as it always adds to our understanding of the universe, this story makes me sick.
I cant say anything more than "Why the fuck would anyone/country want/need/desire/imagine/devise/whatever a scenario to kill 10million people by dropping a fucking asteroid on them". The same logic that wants to put up ICBM missle defense grids are the same that want to spy on China are the same who want to extort apologies are the same that want to kill palestinians are the same that want to sign the FTAA are the same that want fund studies to divert asteroids into the planet - who the fuck are these people and who put them in charge?
Foot and mouth gone for good...and 2023 might be a lot earlier than when the UK government could have it under control I hear it knocks out Mad Cows as well.
I would guess that the Brits would probably aim for Paris first.
What advantage does an asteroid have over a ICBM-delivered nuke? I can't see any.
Considering that the asteroid is delivered by swatting it with nukes that would make almost any target just as dead as it would be if hit by the rock, I think I'd rather stick with the nukes.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"...the researchers say their study is a serious attempt to show how asteroids could be turned into weapons of mass destruction." Great. Just what we need. More weapons. Like we don't have enough ways to kill people as it is...
Homer Jay Simpson
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
New York would be a better target.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Hasn't Coventry already been there and done that?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Are they going to have a guy in a space suit and a cowboy hat, doing that scene from Dr. Strangelove as the asteroid goes down?
Aside from the SciFi sound of all this, I can't help but feel how weird such a story seems.
You'd have to race your nuclear toys up to an unsuspecting asteroid, somehow land your payload at just the right places with very little gravity to help, then detonate everything at just the right time.
I don't see this becoming the latest terrorist threat anytime soon.
And so it goes.
Actually the biggest problem has always been that it is extremely unlikely that we would spot the asteroid that's going to hit us. There's too much space and objects to cover with the current resources.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Gentlemen, we must not allow an asteroid gap. Otherwise we could lose our way of life and the essence of our precious bodily fluids.
If they can willy-nilly sick an asteroid at a *specific town* on earth, why can't they use the same technology to thwart any asteroid threat? Does this mean the end of "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" style movies?
Old axiom: Don't s**t where you live. F**king with space objects, expecially the one which constitutes your biosphere, is proof of the Theory of Natural Selection. 'nuf said.
Due to the glaring obfuscation in the lead post of Comet and Asteroid, I have compiled the following glossary for the poster's edification:
_ _
Comet: A ball of frozen methane and cosmic dust travelling in sharply elliptical orbits from far outside the inner solar system and back out again.
Asteroid: Large, irregularly shaped metallic chunks floating in a dispersed belt which orbits the sun in a more nearly circular path between Mars and Jupiter.
Meteor: A piece of solid space matter that enters the earth's atmosphere.
Meteorite: A piece of solid space matter that enters the earth's atmosphere and doesn't get completely burnt up, but actually makes it to the surface of the earth.
_______________brokenhill.net____________
___________brokenhill.net___________
"Esotericism should not be mental, it should have ritual." --M. Duchamp
The evolution of human warfare:
- Throw Rock
- Hit other guy with stick
- Hit other guy with sharp stick
- Shoot stick at other guy with curved stick
- Hit other guy with sharp copper stick
- Hit other guy with sharp bronze stick
- Hit other guy with sharp iron stick
- Hit other guy with sharp steel stick
- Shoot stick at other guy with REALLY BIG curved stick.
- Shoot stick at other guy with stick with trigger.
- Shoot metal rock at other guy with rock with trigger.
- Drop exploding metal rocks on other guy
- Drop unstable atomic metal rocks on other guy
- Throw rock
Wow! Isn't human progress impressive?
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
One thing I always love to do on /. is read an article, then go ahead and scroll to the very last post to see just how far off topic it has gotten. Usually, the word 'ass' is in there somewhere.
Unless I miss my guess, the explosion referenced here was the incident of 30 June 1908, when something exploded 8 km above the river Stony Tunguska in Siberia. Unfortunately, the jury is still out on the actual cause of that blast. It could have been a comet, asteroid, or meteorite... but the off-beat theories may equally be valid -- that it was a rift in space-time, that a massive explosion in nearby dimensions tripped into this one, etc.
Just because they're wacky doesn't mean they're wrong.
MCH/VO S* W- N+++++ PEC+++ D(s++/r) A a+>+++ C* G++(++++) Q+ 666 Y
Satellite exploded just when it hits the Earth atmosphere, we all die a long painful death. Then a giant asteroid hit the Earth. Million years later, giant intelligent ants (the new dominant specie on Earth) wondering if an asteroid wipe out the apemen. I am pretty sure that is what happened to the dinosaurs...
Are you thought the Russians are crazy!
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
This is public knowledge now. I don't think something like this can sneak up on anyone.
perhaps they'll cloak it!
---I took a bit of a "bite," reading about a drive.
"Somebody set up us the asteroid!"
This is Yet Another Way to kill people. No Kidding.
This brings me back to when slashdot ran a story on a space war simulation run by the Army set in 2017.
This would be one of the weapons, surely. It couldnt be all that easy to try and blow up an asteroid hurtling at you at many km/h.
Why risk having planes or subs or ships vulnerable out over sea or land, when you could just ditch them sn asteroid from outer space. Just have a coupler kamikazee satellite nukes up there ready to go boom with a clikety clikety. Risk free aye.
NOT LA. I live in LA. Granted taking out 1. Hollywood, 2. Celebs, 3. The Church of Scientology tm, (C), etc. I'll move. Bastards.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
All your towns are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive...make your time.
(ugh... soo sorry as to do all that.)
I am Jack's HTTP Server
But just looking at the efficiency misses the whole point of this. The point is secrecy. Any country sending 15 nukes against another will likely be found out before their nukes even exlode. The result, then, would probably be massive retaliation by other nuclear powers. With this method, it can be done secretly. It was "The Wrath of God" that did it.
I remember something called the Thor system; about 250Kg iron projectile dropping on cities from an eccentric Earth orbit in "High Frontier" it hits with about 15KT going 17,500 mph. Nothing came of it because of treaties against space weapons, unfortunatly its not that hard to get 250 Kgs up their. A lot non-signatory nations and terrorist organizations are working on it now. A bomb; who needs an A bomb with this!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
What, do these guys work for Dr. Evil? Do they have a base under some mountain? Are they gonna ask for 1 million dollars? I've read comic books with more logistically sound DIABOLICAL plans!
I think someone should make a blow for historical acuracy here and say: bollocks.
The film is based on a number of seperate events. The first two being entirely British endevours, the third being an entirely US endevour.
Although I haven't seen it I believe the film purports to concern the capture of the first navel Enigma and encryption keys. This act was performed by HMS Aubretia, HMS Bulldog and other escort ships of the Royal Navy.
Five seconds of web searching threw up this page.
(\/)atthew
Coventry is much more worthy of Annihilation!
:-(
Telford is on my doorstep, anyhow - so there won't be much left of me
New Slashdot poll:
Best place to plant an Asteroid:
1...Los Angeles
2...Seattle
3...Melbourne
4...Coventry
5...CowboyNeal
"This gives new meaning to someone set us up the bomb!"
"FIRST ASTEROID POST!!!"
"Someone'd better call Bruce Willis..."
Okay, now on to a (well, hopefully) meaningful post. I wonder what would happen if they missed. Or if the asteroid was a little too big and actually affected the environment. Wait, that isn't the top priority on this would-be agenda, is it?
Do you like German cars?
How convenient is this for any country? What exactly are the chances that an asteroid would be in the right place at the right time during a war?
By right place and right time, most of these asteroids are a few years off, and there's very little chance they'd be in the right place during a war.
Do you like German cars?
In their simulation, the expected error was a few hundred miles. In other words, aim at England, hit France or Ireland. Mostly this is because you can't adjust the power of the steering nuke blasts -- it's like putting with hand-grenades. Get a better propulsion system and you should be able to get pinpoint accuracy -- but it might take a few practice shots to figure out how much atmospheric entry will deflect an asteroid of a given size and shape. NASA's first manned flights came down up to a hundred miles off target, and those capsules were far more steerable than a rock.
Actually, this seems like the perfect answer to the threat of a Earth-asteroid collision. It seems highly unlikely that we would not know of an immenant collision well before it actually happened. The problem has always been, what do we do about it? Well now the answer is, bank-shot it away! By nudging one of the smaller rocks, we could aim it the offender and knock it off course with less effort than trying to affect the trouble maker itself.
You only need to haul 15 bombs around the sun to get the effect of, well, 15 bombs on the ground.
One of the big points made was that you could do all the required manipulation while the asteroid was hidden by the sun, making it look like an accident.
So it took scientists weeks of planning to get Mir to land somewhere in the Pacific after dropping from low-Earth orbit.
And now they claim they're gonna hit a town? The center of town? By "nudging" it with large explosives while it's in deep space?
Curby
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
It would make a lot more sense as a deterrent tha n nukes do. Use relatively small rocks about 500 - 1000 pounds. Somebody launches nukes drop rocks on them. Roughly same damage but no long term radiation from your side at least. It gives the human race a fighting chance to survive.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
I just finished a novel called "Newton's Cannon", by Gregory Keyes (I think?) where one of Isaac Newton's students invents such a weapon. The student defects to France, and targets the asteroid at London. A neat bit of historical speculative fiction.
ranting demagogue? is it just me or does that post somehow get 'louder' as you read it?
does your reasoning extend to judging the intellectual capabilities of a person based on their color, race, creed, sex, or maybe something more important, like their haircut?
This is a good idea, one that hordes of sci fi writers have used to their advantage. A good example of this is Larry Niven's Footfall - bug-eyed monsters journey into the solar system and proceed to obliterate earth's culture, much of which is done by dropping rocks from the sky.
I also seem to recall reading several years ago about flying crowbars - shafts of steel with a rudimentary guidance system and image recognition. You space a couple of thousand of these guys over a country that you don't like with programming that tells the crowbar to guide itself towards military targets, and they use the kinetic energy gained from the fall from space to destroy the target.
Asteroids are next to useless as weapon.
Firstly it will take months to devise "fire solution" which is useless in terms of a hairtrigger engagement. The element of surprise is completely lost when your craft take of to rendevous with the asteroid, and all it would take to shut down your plan is a quick nuclear strike by the opposing side. Thirdly the path of your asteroid has to be so precise if you want it to hit an exact target at an exact time, and you won't get that kind of accuracy with nuclear blasts. All in all it makes a pretty poor weapon
No, Russian. Eastern Front. Red Army. Largest and most feared fighting force on Earth. (NB IANAR: I am not a Russian) And, of course, without the Brits the Americans would all be speaking French right now. Or Spanish. You'd all be Quebecois or Mexicans! How do you like that?
Without us brits, who would play the bad guys in films?
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
er, why not bypass the oversized middleman and just fire the nukes straight at telford? ive been there and know this would solve alot of problems. \/ peace.
--
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No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
- Racing (non-nuclear) toy [NEAR] up to the asteroid Eros: Check.
- Landing the entire spacecraft (which was not designed to land): Check.
- Firing rocket thrusters at just the right time: Check.
Aside from putting a bomb on board, what else would they need? The rest of the job can be - has been - done by a school. (It's not a terrorist threat, it's a stealth threat from hostile governments with nuclear weapons. There are still a couple of those on Earth, you know.)--
spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Yay, we British are extremely smart chaps. We have made a Revolutionary Carbon Fibre based propulsion device.
When a projectile (Consisting of classified material,widely rumored to be an isotope of Silicon.) is fired from this device, we are able to knock off spherical objects suspended from another Carbon fibre based structure, as distant as 2 metres.
We are planning to patent this device and call it the SLING-SHOT-MI5 .
Last time the Russian took down their space station, they have to request the fishman in the southern pacific to get their butts off. So if you cannot target the asteroid to within a radius of one mile you don't have a good weapon in hand. The fall off from the asteroid might hit right at yourself miles from epic-center.
Let's Roid all our enemies cities! All your city are belong to US! Just joking. Well well... planet busters and nuclears weapons in space are illegal. So no doomsday weapons.
--- Hajotkaa siihen, kapitalistit!
let's work out the sums:
Impact speed : 11km/s (minimum) - escape velocity.
15 small nuclear bombs, let's say 20MT yield this gives 300MT.
1MTonne TNT=4.5x10^15 Joules IIRC.
Hence a yield of about 10^18 Joules.
Taking KE=0.5*m*v^2
This gives m = 2*KE/v^2
m= 2*10^18/(11000)^2 = 10^10kg (approx)
Using a density of about 10^4 kg/m^3, Volume is about 10^6m^3.
This means that we're talking about an asteroid of diameter 100 metres here. That's getting a bit big to be an unknown asteroid (subject, of course, to any stupidness on my part, and the usual rounding errors). This is not an infeasible size for the application though - we track a very small proportion of these objects.
However, a smaller asteroid (which are more likely not to be tracked) would still cause pretty major devastation.
The problem for any would be despots would, of course, be making an undetected launch to deflect the asteroid, rather than deflecting the thing. Also there's the problem of deflecting the object in a controlled way (the method given sounds a little hard to fine tune).
For a related weapon (this time rocks fired from the moon), read 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' by Heinlein. (Amazon.com/Amazon.co.uk)
--
Murky
Murky
A wannabe geek with no money to geek with.
You have no chance to survive make your karma.
--
Yes, the nick is flamebait
I am just glad they are planning on landing this thing on the other side of the world. I have high doubts for their ability, I mean just look at their teeth.
http://www.phatmax.net
the pr0n-o-matic
http://www.phatmax.net
the pr0n-o-matic
because they don't waste all their time on dental hygene? :)
(sorry, couldn't resist
proof?
umm, I was assuming this was all a joke.
If you're serious, then that's sad.
chill dude, we're all on the same side
(ps. you'd scarf burgers too, but they're all diseased)
Ok, back on topic... The scientists were obviously joking. I assume this was a warning about what technology hoarding 3rd world countries could do 20, 30, 50 years down the road. Sooo an asteroid tracking system would be a useful thing to think about. Could be useful for catching random asteroids floating by too. (And don't forget the threat of people bouncing lasers off of satellites... Another reality decades down the road)
Ahh, that's why Germans have such small penises. You bastards infected their bloodlines!!
FLAME ON!!!
The King was no musician, he was a singer, and a crap guitarist.
Graceland:Music::Mecca:Islam
Have you heard of "The Beatles"?
Yes. One down, three to go. And they still suck.
Oh, actors, Sir Laurence Olivier?
Dead.
Sir John Gielgud?
Gay.
Gary Oldman?
What, the little black kid from Diff'rent Strokes? You don't seriously expect me to believe he's a Brit!
Where do you want to go today?
No doubt. I recommend the Brits reading this thread rent the movie U-571, a historically accurate portrayal of American servicemen capturing the first German Enigma machine, without which said Brits would now be wearing lederhosen.
Where do you want to go today?
If you seriously think The King is dead, you have simply accepted the conventional explanation for his disappearance like a typical sheep.
Where do you want to go today?
Of course, an incident like that could only happen in Scotland, the last bastion of manliness in the UK, and they're trying to break away!
PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND!
The American people are willing to help you in your struggle against the British oppressor with men and armament! Our state militias are better armed than most Third World nations! We can help you!
Where do you want to go today?
What!? Screen on. Someone set us up the asteroid! Good evening gentlemen, all your boiling sea are belong to us.
...a space opera written by E.E. "Doc" Smith in the 1930s and 40s is the first known science fiction story to feature the use of "mass drivers," although I'm not sure if that's what he called them. The above-linked Babylon 5 episode page references Smith.. And as portrayed in this jaw-dropper of an episode, mass drivers are awesome, terrifying, and a pretty darned efficient way to flatten a planet.