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."
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.
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...
...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
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