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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.
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!
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!
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.
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