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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."
It's the new arms race! WWIII will be a billards game played out in space!
I assume these scientists were inspired by watching Babylon 5. Mass drivers can be fun!
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".
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'
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/
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.
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...
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...
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
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
...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
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
I'm sold on the concept so far. So do they want donations to help now or what?
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.
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
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
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
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.