NASA Plays Well With Comets

jmichaelg writes "Taking a page from Hollywood, NASA approved a Deep Impact mission to poke a seven story hole into Comet Tempel 1. It's a little tough to get past the grandstanding on NASA's part - the collision is scheduled for July 4, 2005. OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros. Clearly, they need a bit of practice. Last year, Los Alamos Labs detected two meteors impacting the earth. The bigger of the two explosions was estimated at between 6000-8000 tons of TNT which is 1/2 to 2/3'rds of the bomb's yield that was dropped on Hiroshima. The Tunguska comet/asteroid explosion in 1908 was the equivalent of a 15-40 megaton bomb. The Near Earth Asteroid Tracking observatory keeps turning up previously unknown near earth asteroids all the time so it's just a matter of time before NASA will have to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid lest it destroy some part of us." We ran another story about this earlier this year.

Comments

300,000?

[Wyatt Earp]

When in the last...oh...thousand years have even 1,000 people died from a metorite strike on year?

Personally, I find your figure of 300,000 dying each cenury a little far fetched.

Unless you are counting all the dinosaurs that geeked it when the Big One hit back in 65,000,000 B.C.E.

Re:300,000?

[Wyatt Earp]

"And we have had a few, chicago fire killed a lot of people, and that was a bunch of small "meteor strikes accorss the whole midwest US, fires it caused killed a entire town in wisconson, someone remind me of the name, but the death count was over 1500. Estimated death count for all those areas involved in what is collectively called the great chicago fire is like 15,000 - 25,000. But I could be mixing facts on that one."

When? When did metor strikes across the midwest kill people?
Last I heard the Great Chicago Fire wasn't startd by a metor or Mrs. O'Leary's cow.

As for tunguska, I thought it was in a desolate part of Siberia, so far off the beaten path, it was monthes or years till it was investigated.

And the strike in the Saudi desert. The Wabar meteorite impact site in the Empty Quarter (Ar-Rub' Al-Khali) desert of Saudi Arabia was in 1863. And they don't call the Empty Quarter, the empty quarter because it's 3/4 empty, it's empty because no one lives there. I still think an average of 3,000 a year is very, very, very high for deaths by metor.

Re:300,000?

[J05H]

i dont have my copy of Rain of Iron and Ice (John Lewis) with me, but that is similar to his figures. Most of the deaths are from tsunamis that are created by ocean-impacters, and are actually quite hard to trace, but definitely there. A lot of the deaths are in places like the Pacific islands, with little comm infrastructure even now, but plenty of stories that describe tsunamis washing over villages.

Also, events like the Chinese city that was destroyed in 1490, something like 10-20,000 people dying from "stones raining from the sky".

http://www.sns.ias.edu/~piet/press/worldend.html

has some great civilization-wrecking disasters.

Re:300,000?

[nuintari]

Dude, its an average, spread accross one year for statistics. Do you not understand statistics. So, if 3000 people didn't die this year, 6000 have to die next year to maintain it, or 9000 the next year. It adds up until ya get a big strike, like tunguska, although only a few hundred people are bel;ieved to have died there. The point is, maybe no one dies for centuries, but then one hits and kills a half a million people.

And we have had a few, chicago fire killed a lot of people, and that was a bunch of small meteor strikes accorss the whole midwest US, fires it caused killed a entire town in wisconson, someone remind me of the name, but the death count was over 1500. Estimated death count for all those areas involved in what is collectively called the great chicago fire is like 15,000 - 25,000. But I could be mixing facts on that one.

There is also recorded documentation of nighttimes bright as day in London and cities accross western Europe, and a religios document claiming refercne to the fiery mountain from god in russian like a week before. People die in russia, the ash the strike throws upo reflects light in the atmosphere and westerners see pretty lights all night long for a week.

Check your history, there are no documented cases of asteroid strikes, but their are plenty of acts of god all over theplace. What do you think that big area of glass covered desert in suadi arabia is from? The natives fear that place because allah burned it to the ground and into glass......

Re:300,000?

[nuintari]

Well, personally, I believe the chicago fire was caused by meteors. And I say that in plural. If you look at the chain of events around that, there were similier fires that sprung up all the way from arkansas up to wisconsin, and they all started within hours of each other.

As for arabs, yeah, I knew that place was empty. If I know my theology, and I proboaly don't, they considered it a holy place before it was hit. I think they believe some great sinner entered the area and Allah got pissed. So like, 15 highwaymen might have died there, in a really interesting way I might add.

And back to tunguska, yeah, its out in the middle of BFE, but from the initial investigation, all the tribes said, no one was inside the blast area. Aparranetly, it had been some area that was decreed off limits for cattle grazing due o some tribal warefare, it was kind of a neutral zone. But 30 years later, they got some of the locals to admit that some clans were grazing animals in the area. They feared that the gods would strike them down if they talked, so they kept quiet for years.

And I don't think 3000 a year is unreasonable, the really, nasty, big rocks hit us fairly rarely, once in a blue moon. But they can potentialy kill a lot of people. The average is maintained over millenia. Man'e been around for a long time and a lot can happen.

Chicago Fire

[Wyatt Earp]

Well, theres a lot of documentation out there about the Fire, and nothing points to metor strikes.

http://www.chicagohs.org/history/fire.html

"The summer of 1871 was very dry, leaving the ground parched and the wooden city vulnerable. On Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, just after nine o'clock, a fire broke out in the barn behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary at 13 DeKoven Street. How the fire started is still unknown today, but an O'Leary cow often gets the credit. "

NASA deflection? Hardly.

[J05H]

NASA doesn't really have the capability to do an asteroid deflection. There is only one organization, probably in the world, that could handle it: the US military.

Sure, NASA would be used for some consultation, but any deflections would be an AirForce/Boeing/Lockmart/NRO/NSA endeavour. The military is used to working under severe time and situational constraints, NASA is not. It might cost tens of billions of dollars, but the military will be able to accomplish it, whereas NASA would do something like forget to convert imperial to metric.

When the time comes (and it will), NASA will be a consultation and tech resource, nothing more. The rockets will be commercial Deltas or Titans, the nukes will come from the Air Force, and the failsafe methodologies will be purely DoD.

Easier to hit than land

[coreman]

The impact will go well. It's far easier to impact than to orbit and/or land. If the impact vehicle goes into "safe" mode at the wrong time, it'll just make a shallower pit. The more interesting question is how the observatory part of the mission is going to slow down to orbit the comet for observations ahead of the balls to the wall impact vehicle...

Re:Easier to hit than land

[Tackhead]

> The impact will go well. It's far easier to impact than to orbit and/or land.

...as the past two Mars probes have already shown ;)

Intergalactic billiards

[The Dodger]

The way NASA's luck 's been recently, the impact will prbably knock the comet onto a collision course with Earth.

That would probably rank as the biggest "Oops!" in history. :-)

D.

Re:Intergalactic billiards

[brianvan]

Yea, I think NASA has been watching "3rd Rock From The Sun" a bit too much. Now they're getting ideas...

Of course, this is an organization that probably refers (internally) to any potential super high speed space travel technology as a "warp drive"...

Re:Um, there are NO recorded meteorite deaths.

[Xerithane]

In all fairness, you are using the same logic that anti-tobacco company lobyists are using (Although I'm not sure of your political motivation ;)).

300,000 people die each year from tobacco. I've heard numerous reports of people being added in that statistic for things like smoking while driving and getting in a car accident and other vaguely connected statistics.

As for your statistics, I think you are just way off based. Tunguska wasn't even really thought of as a meteor strike, and the closest town (Irkutsk) only showed a spike on a siesmograph.. I think the only large group of living organisms killed by that meteor was reindeer.

95% of statistics can be skewed to support an argument.

two words

[nuintari]

two words man, orbital mechanics. People need to realize that flying around in space is NOTHING like flying around in the atmosphere. Everything is in circles. You have gravity influence from the earth, which you are cirling, all and all the major local masses, especially jupiter and the sun.

For instance, you wanna get to a probe that it is the same orbit, and therfore, going the same speed as you. You speed up, which transfers you to a higher orbit, and you have to pass the thing by, and drop down to speed and it comes up behind you. IF you time it right. It takes supercomputers to calculate this stuff, the math behind it is so complex that it exceeds Einstein's physics.

People need to stop belieing that space travel is like we see it on Hollywood, cause its not.

Re:two words

[nuintari]

Ever heard of planning? You think they go up there, and calculate that stuff on the fly? Fuck no, they plan ahead, so when they are up there, those same computers can be used on the fly when something unexpected goes wrong. They still do it today, it makes sense, and they still can't do some of the stuff they want to do. You don't need tons of computer power, just patiece to wait for what ya got to come out say what's probable. Today, they can spend time calculating scenarios, so they can be even more prepared, and its still not enough. I just love how your average person thinks its just, point the rockets and fire em off, and your there.

Re:two words

[vidarh]

Personally I think a lot of people would give good money for some of what you're smoking...

<sarcasm> Supercomputers to calculate? Yeah right. Guess they had lots of processing power during the Mercury and Apollo programs, because obviously NASA must have access to alien technology that are much more advanced than what the rest of the world had at that time. </sarcasm>

Re:Um, there are NO recorded meteorite deaths.

[nuintari]

Its all an estimation dude, because recorded history gets chopped before printing was invented, and even after that, most of it was religious for a long time. And again, I must reiterate, its an average based on data from a VERY LONG TIME. We haven't had any substancial impacts in this cetury, and we had one last century (in tersm of death toll, tunguska killed a few hundred people or so). But what about 500 AD? 0 AD? 500 BC? That's a long time and there are a lot of fluctuations in populations very small areas, and evidence of impacts occuring at th same time.

Stop thinking about it as a "3000 must die every year" its an average based on data pieced togther since man started walking.

might add....

[nuintari]

in the fifties, this was all done by hand. Imagine doing stuff they teach in graduate level classes at universities with nothing but a slide rule and a pencil and paper. people can't even do that anymore.... well, nasa does claim to have a guy who can do orbital mechanics in his head, personally, I'd like to meet him. He's probably deranged.

Celestial performance art?

[Velox_SwiftFox]

It would be interesting if the copper impactor (or an array of smaller ones) could be shaped and/or aimed in such a way as to produce a really pretty display of ejected gasses.

Presumably the plume from the impact would dissipate fairly quickly, but for a while recognisable shapes might be crafted.

And then there are the commercial possibilities, the advertising value of having your company's logo displayed across the sky for all in viewing latitudes to see should be worth a big donation to NASA. Or maybe the initials of someone who has too much money to throw away, like amateur astronaut Dennis Tito, could be tapped to subsidize the mission.

The possibilities are as endless as the bounds of bad taste!

Re:Nothing to worry about

[Velox_SwiftFox]

Ah, I hope so. They seem a bity confused already:

It's hard to tell for sure how much copper is involved. The site linked to, and the press release linked to from there, give 3 possible masses. Well, actually, one mass and two quantities of force - it will weigh a variable amount in pounds under acceleration and zero pounds once in free fall, but will maintain the same mass in kilograms throughout.

Okay, since copper is not a precious metal I'll assume we aren't talking troy pounds. So is the impactor:

770 pounds (349.272 kg)?

771 pounds (349.7256 kg)?

350 kilograms (~771.605 Pounds)?

Naturally, the USA news services that picked up the press release judt dropped the "350 kilogram" number. Hopefully NASA will figure out exactly what it masses before launch. Navigation would go so much better!

"771 pound copper bullet" targeting comet

[Velox_SwiftFox]

After accidently plinking Mars with that probe, hasn't NASA learned to work in the metric system yet?

And is that Avoirdupois or Troy pounds?

Chasing Eros... isn't that a movie?

[stefanlasiewski]

They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros.

Funny, I spent a large chunk of my earlier years attempting a women rendezvous and spent years chasing Eros (love/lust).

Re:Better editing

[sconeu]

OK, clueless dude. "megaton" = equivalent yield to one million tons of TNT.

Therefore, Tunguska was anywhere from 2000 to 6700 times more powerful than the referenced explosion.

Sheesh! Can't anyone do simple math anymore.

I see someone has been watching...

[MattGWU]

...The Discovery Channel.

If it's not police chases, it's Egypt.

If it's not Egypt, it's asteroids and comets

If it's not asteroids and comets, it's a feature on something that's being shown in the latest movie (Pearl Harbor, Egypt, etc)

That thing with the Russian comet air burst was on for *hours* last night...it was inescapable (except for a thing on minesweepers [yep, the game, obviously] on History Channel).

The Discovery Channel has become the "EgyptPoliceChasesAsteroidsTopicalMovieStuff" Channel, but must Slashdot follow suit?

And if I'm flipping through channels and I see that security camera recording of that convenience store robber who puts his rifle on the counter, and the clerk grabs it again, I'm going to have an anuerysm. That, or the police chase with that guy driving a tank down the LA freeway.

Slashdot Hype

[zpengo]

Ummm....from the article:

This is the first attempt to peer beneath the surface of a comet to its freshly exposed material for clues to the early formation of the solar system. The public can share in this exciting experiment by observing the impact and its effect from earth. Dramatic images from cameras on both the impactor and the spacecraft will be sent back to earth in near real-time and the event will be broadcast on television.

This is about research, not about blowing up comets to save the earth.

NASA *can* hit asteroids...

[Dr. Zowie]

The initial problem with the Eros rendezvous wasn't a navigational issue. It was a problem with the spacecraft rocket motor not switching off! Deep Impact won't have such a long final burn -- just midcourse corrections, where there's plenty of time to fix any problems.

I work with scientific spacecraft, and I'm still always surprised at the precision with which we can determine distances and positions of distant objects. SOHO is a million miles from Earth, and its radial position is known to within a few centimeters.

Barring egregious mismanagement, it's not that hard to hit celestial bodies -- we have the right tools for the job!

Let the picking of nits commence!

[DrFlounder]

Los Alamos didn't actually detect the meteors impacting the earth. They detected an air pressure wave given off by their entry into the atmosphere. They don't know whether they hit the earth or not. There was no actual explosion with energy equal to 6000-8000 tons of TNT. Instead the magnitude of the pressure wave was the same as it would have been if caused by such an explosion.

Hyperbole

[seaker]

so it's just a matter of time before NASA will have to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid lest it destroy some part of us

Well I suppose it is a matter of time, but we could be talking throusands or even millions of years here.

Only nickel core objects can make it to the ground (everything else explodes in the upper athmosphere). These are rare enough. So a very large object would be needed before a big Megaton force blast is felt on the ground. And based on the size of the objects and how often these hit, the mean time between earth impact is large. On the order of thousands of years.

Personally, I don't think its something that is likely to happen in my life time. That said all these sky surveys for Near Earth Objects is to correctly assess the risk. The current margin of error in the calculations is large.

Then again I could get squashed by a giant falling rock before I fini

-----------------------------

Re:Hyperbole

[Veteran]

Sadly the odds against a civilization ending impact are not nearly as great as one would hope for.

If we assume that a 1000 meter rock is large enough to do the trick then the actual odds of impact are - over the next 20 years - just 5000 to one against the impact. That is very lousy odds for an event that could kill a billion people.

A one KM diameter asteroid traveling at 21 Km per sec has the explosive energy of one hundred thousand 1 megaton hydrogen bombs. The fireball from such an impact would be about 75 miles across - big enough to punch out of the atmosphere much as Shoemaker Levy 9 did with Jupiter. The estimate is that we take a hit from a rock this size about every 100,000 years - over a 20 year span that gives about 1 in 5000 chance of a hit.

Of course we have been on the good side of that 5000 to one odds every 20 years since the beginning of recorded history.

Re:Hyperbole

[markmoss]

Since the last big one was 65 million years ago, we've probably got plenty of time -- but the next one could be tomorrow or 100 million years from now. I think the odds against a strike big enough to destroy civilation world-wide in the next decade are around 10-million to one, but people do buy insurance against events that are no more likely than that. I think there should be a sensible program to work towards the capability to detect and deflect large meteorites, and eventually comets -- but mainly because I think that acquiring the needed spaceflight and telescopic capabilities will pay off in other ways.

Re:Hyperbole

[Alkranin]

"Only nickel core objects can make it to the ground (everything else explodes in the upper athmosphere)." That is completly and totaly incorrect. Most metoers that hit the earth are iron or magnesium sillicate (Often called "rock" on earth) Nickle is a fairly rare element, when you think about it on the cosmic scale. I am not going to go into heavy element formation in Asmyptotic Giant Branch stars but lets just say iron is by far more common than nickle.

Page from Hollywood, indeed.

[Buran]

We've had two missions already that take their names from TV and movies.

Deep Space One is an experimental probe designed to test ion propulsion and semi-autonomous operation. Deep Space Two was an auxiliary payload on the Mars Polar Lander that was designed to send two impact probes to drive into the surface of Mars and perform tests (they were lost along with the lander for unknown reasons.)

What will happen when we get to Deep Space Nine? According to the back of one of my DS9 novels, the phrase is trademarked. Will Paramount raise a fuss when NASA gets far enough along in the project series to argue with them? I hope not, since it'd be great PR. Besides, I don't think you can really trademark the term when used that way. They also tried to trademark "USS Enterprise" some time back, but the Navy understandably got upset and gave them some smackdown. I'm sure the thousands of sailors who have served on her agree with the sentiment.

Still, I look forward to seeing what Deep Impact can do. It'll help us carry out a mission like the Messiah's in the future if it ever becomes necessary in reality. (The Messiah, by the way, is an incredibly cool design. Who would have thought you could combine the Space Shuttle, ISS modules, Energia/Shuttle booster rockets, spare external tanks, and a NERVA engine so exquisitely?)

Re:Page from Hollywood, indeed.

[Soft]

The Messiah, by the way, is an incredibly cool design. Who would have thought you could combine the Space Shuttle, ISS modules, Energia/Shuttle booster rockets, spare external tanks, and a NERVA engine so exquisitely?

An Orion engine, if you please... Silently omitting that it would have been powered by atomic explosions so as not to upset the Greens.

Yes, it was cool!

Re:Page from Hollywood, indeed.

[markmoss]

I thought about that when I was watching Bruce Willis' shuttle trying to thread through all the loose rocks. The Orion would be a great ship for this kind of work, especially in the form proposed by Niven and Pournelle in Footfall. It wouldn't be hurt by the smaller rocks, and it could either push a big asteroid around or disintegrate a cluster of 100-foot rocks using just it's drive system. Of course launching it would be the worst ecological disaster in 65 million years, but it's minor compared to a major meteorite impact.

For you guys that don't know what I'm talking about: Orion was a 1950's or 60's proposal for a nuclear powered spaceship using only existing technology. It would consist of a cabin mounted on a very big, thick metal bell. To go, you launch a small nuclear bomb out the back and detonate it at the right distance for the bell to catch the blast without melting down. Repeat every few seconds until you are going fast enough. In the novel Footfall, to repel an alien invasion they created an Orion battleship by putting a heavy cruiser (ocean-going type) hull on the bell. Modern warships are designed so they can be sealed up for protection against chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but I'm not sure how much work it might take to make it airtight for space. But for the rest, it's armored, it's got eight inch guns to deal with the "small" stuff, and if those are insufficient you just build up speed towards the target, turn the ship, and toss some nukes. 8-)

Re:Oh come on you people

[Buran]

"Notice how the military is no longer using the shuttle for its missions... it proved too expensive for the one-shot launches more suited to USAF missions."

Partially true, partially not. When the Shuttle was under development in the 1960s and 1970s, the military specified that it wanted the Shuttle to be able to carry payloads of up to 60 feet in length and 15 feet wide. That is the reason that the Shuttle's cargo bay is the size that it is, and a large part of the overall size, since the orbiter had to be designed around that bay size. This is also the reason for the size of the Soviet Buran shuttle (yes, where my name comes from), since that program largely used the work done on the US shuttle. "If it works just fine," reasoned the Soviets, "then why waste time and money doing the research again?" (You can go here to read more about Buran.)

To this day, the military has not specified what that payload was, though I speculate that it was likely a KH-12 spy satellite or a similar vehicle, which is reportedly very similar to the overall design of the Hubble telescope but optimised for looking back at the Earth instead of toward the stars. Using different sensors, of course; Hubble would be blinded if it pointed at the Moon or Earth. Hubble, incidentally, is one of the few payloads to even come close to filling the entire payload bay. Hubble filled nearly all of it; the emptiest shuttle mission ever was the first flight, STS-1 -- carried out in April of 1981 -- that carried no payload whatsoever.

"... the USAF doesnt really like to work with NASA any more since they were hoodwinked into paying for part of the Shuttle ...

Hoodwinked? No. They actually had input on the design and helped to make its development into a working vehicle possible. DoD stopped putting military payloads on the Shuttle because one has been lost. It seems that the military believes that one loss in 25 missions is unacceptable, even though to this day there have been none since in over 75 more missions. This is actually a good record, since there have been mishaps with just about every launch vehicle out there. It's just that the loss of the Space Shuttle results in huge publicity (rightfully so) while the loss of, say, a Delta II results in a collective national yawn and a flip of the channel to a football game. Even the Air Force's workhorse the Titan IV has failed several times, not just once.

The Shuttle fleet is too busy right now to accept a military mission in any case, however, since three of the four shuttles are constantly flying to the space station and the fourth, Columbia, has not reentered service after its last Orbiter Maintenance Down Period (OMDP). Columbia is too heavy to reach the ISS, so she will be flying science missions as the shuttle did for years before the ISS began assembly in 1998.

NEATO

[FortKnox]

The Near Earth Asteroid Tracking observatory

Am I the only one that sees the abbreviation for the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Observatory is NEATO?

I bet they did that on purpose, those crazy astronomers!

Cool Images

[Manitcor]

Be sure to watch for this one. According to another article i read on this in this months issue of Popular Science (page 64) It will create a pit 25 meters wide by 100 meters deep which will launch a slow-motion plume of gas and ice into space.

The theory also says that the plume may spew into space months after impcat providing tons of data on the compisition of comets (which belive it or not we know very little about other than theroy).

JHU APL, not NASA, in charge of NEAR

[Philbert Desenex]

OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros.

First, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab did all the mission design.

Second, JHUAPL didn't "miss" Eros - see the report. ...the main engine's normal start-up transient exceeded a lateral acceleration safety threshold that was set too low. It was an onboard software problem. Also, please note that NEAR carried out much more than its planned mission even after the hose-up. You really can't accuse anyone of having trouble "hitting an asteroid".

Why destroy it?

[AlbanySux]

and why does NASA have to do it? Maybe our time here is up and we should be obliterated. And this may be the only way to destroy the evil empire that is Microsoft. I say let the commet come and hope it hits Redmond!

Some credit may be due...

[Soft]

OTOH, hitting an asteroid something NASA has to demonstrate they can do. They missed on their first attempt at an asteroid rendezvous and spent a year chasing Eros. Clearly, they need a bit of practice.

Now, wait, there has been quite a number of probes which missed their targets; can you name any, other than NEAR, which caught up with their target after doing so at the first encounter? Perhaps Japan's Planet-B in 2003, kind of... And which performed a soft landing on said target? None so far.

Ah, but if I'm not mistaken, NEAR was operated by JPL, not NASA; perhaps that's what you meant?

it's just a matter of time before NASA will have to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid lest it destroy some part of us.

NASA no longer is adapted to crash-course missions; they'll ask for 10 years and/or a few trillion dollars. Better contract with private companies...

band of material?

[freeweed]

one might be coming soon due to the band of material the Earth is soon to encounter

Any chance you have a URL with some more info on this? (You can imagine what a Google search on 'band of material' brings up :). Unless you're talking comet debris, and most of that is pretty tiny, I'd be curious as to just where this material is coming from, and how anyone detected it.

Reminds me of a really neat book from 1987, Exit Earth. The solar system is passing through some kind of matter that makes the sun go semi-nova, and to save humanity these big space-arks.. well, read it youself, it touches on some points that you normally don't see in sci-fi disaster novels.

Are all asteroids metal?

[6EQUJ5]

If so, imagine we perfect cold fusion power, so we have an infinite source of electricity. Then we just charge up the asteroid with a like charge to some large body we can maneuver, and viola! It's deflected.

Or we could surround an area far above the earth with a metal net, and put opposite charge on the net and the asteroid so it will be caught. With infinite electrical power, I bet this would be possible.

Then again, maybe doing a magical fairy dance in your underware at sundown would do the same thing. Do I need a physics lesson?

Another bright idea...

[6EQUJ5]

Send 2 incredibly charged plates into space - no danger of discharge because space is a vacuum. When they near the asteroid, some gas is released that floods the region between the plates and surrounding the asteroid. Of course the gas ionizes, and one huge spark jumps between the plates, vaporizing the asteroid. The great thing about this method is it can't be used as a weapon, solving one of the concerns about nudging asteroid into earth's orbit.

Re:Fraud

[MrRudeDude]

Just like those "global warming people"? You don't acknowledge that fact?

Which fact ? The global warming hypesters have a lot of little psuedo maybe-facts wrapped up in their stuff. Has the earth gotten warmer in the past 20 years ? Yes. Was it due to CO2 ? That hypothesis requires a huge amount of tweaking specialized computer models to make it match up with the data -- predicting Florida election returns with trained neural nets is more respectable, in my opinion. Remember, less than 20 years ago these same "scientists" were trying to get us all riled up about a coming ice age. Will the sea level rise or fall if the average temperature increases ? They can tweak their models either way. Some of them even say that there will be more snowfall in glacial areas, and invent a process which puts us all in an ice age. The one constant in all the models is that we are just flick of a butterfly's wing away from a cascade of causes and effects that ends in total disaster. Because otherwise, the study would not be published.

If the US found a cheap, safe, pollution and CO2 free way to make as much energy as we wanted tomorrow, the Sierra Club and the European Greens would fight it tooth and nail. Why ? Because they don't care about these "facts" of global warming and oil shortages and whatever; what they have is a religion, a faith that says the United States and other industrial nations committed some sin by being rich, and we must pay for it, preferably by giving away a lot of stuff to third world countries, and by sacrificing and suffering and walking around in hemp sandles instead of riding SUV's until our minds are appropriately aligned with the sanctioned TRUTH. Greens and Sierre Clubers would find a technical escape from their invented apocalpse extremely upsetting. That's the main reason why I'm for nuclear and wind energy, not because I actually want to save the world or anything stupid like that -- it's just a great troll of those stupid Kaczynskites.

. . . announcing to slashdotters the depth of your ignorance. . .

That never stopped me before . . .

. . . the fact that you have done NO research in any of these subjects . . .

Well, all of my nasty sniping and hyperbole aside, you would probably be surprised to know what I've done and read. Of course, I took it beyound your level of browsing a couple of articles in Scientific American and Discover, and then masturbating to the thought of how enlightened and politicaly correct I was. Get of the net moron, I think there is a cup of wheat grass or carrot juice or $6 coffee calling your name somewhere.

Collisions in general

[hyehye]

TLC and Discovery have had a lot of impact-scenario shows on lately. What's the sudden fascination about? Simple: The fact that many times in the course of natural history, entire continental, and indeed, global populations have been wiped out by these impacts - and for the first time, Earth has produced a specied that can not only survive it, but entirely prevent it (maybe).

There is an extremely low chance of such a massive collision in the next few hundred years, at least - what should be worrying, instead, is a smaller impact in the Pacific, which could wipe east-coast Japan off the map. These impacts happen much more frequently, some claim once every 10,000 years, and one might be coming soon due to the band of material the Earth is soon to encounter. The effects of such an impact on the global economy are incalculable, and the probabilities of such an occurance are much higher. The Japanese government is growing increasingly concerned, and are considering a 2 to 4 million dollar annual budget for the identification, tracking, and destruction of likely impact masses.

In fact, if the Russian impact of 1908 were in fact a metallic body (as is almost entirely disproven, at this point), and had struck the Pacific instead, this destruction of Japan would have already occured. And when you think about it, a few thousand miles of earth's surface is not a very wide safety margin, relative to the massive distances traveled by these objects.

One comment made in a recent TLC program on this issue strikes me... "Think about it: The number of people we have who are specifically employed to track these objects is smaller than the staff of a neighborhood McDonald's"

And I quote:

[karfglab]

"Me go fast in rocket. Boom-boom blow up comet. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
--Ben Affleck "Armageddon"

Interception smallest part of problem

[ColGraff]

At least when intercepting an asteroid or come, you can get an idea of the thing's orbit from Earth (although with a comet you have to allow for random outgassing). However, to destroy or move an asteroid or comet, you have to know mass and composition. This is the sort of thing that would have to be determined by a probe, with a high degree of detail. Knowing the composition of a tiny piece won't do - you have to know what most of the asteroid is made of with a high degree of certainty, and where all the different material deposits are located in order to find center of mass.
Right now, we don't have the ability to do that. This interception is, in reality, rather meaningless from an Earth-protection point of view, although it is cool. And of course, there's always the scientific benefit.