Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
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...
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?
This is about research, not about blowing up comets to save the earth.
Got Rhinos?
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!
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.
Physics, Cosmology and
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!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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).
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
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!
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?
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...
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.
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"
think for yourself, you won't like the results if others do it for you.
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.
I'm the stranger...posting to