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Air Bags for Planetary Defense
Gallowglass writes "The Canadian paper, the National Post, is reporting on a plan to divert asteroids headed towards Earth. According to the story, the proposer, a Dr. Hermann Burchard, suggests deploying an inflatable mylar bag a few kilometers in size, and using it to push the projectile aside. An air bag for earth? The deployment mechanism isn't detailed in the story."
Is a giant safetybelt taking 2nd place to this idea? :)
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So that's why Chretien's retiring.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
...shows that smaller asteroids may experience neck injuries or even death from the fast deploying air-bags.
Due to Newton's third law, the collision between the asteroid and giant air bag will cause a giant marshmallow shaped object to come thundering down from the sky...
The engineering required to inflate Rob Malda to several kilometers wide must be mind boggling...
So if this air bag hit the asteroid - the misery weight of that air bag against asteroid weight send that air bag with all constructions in it flying with very high speed, while asteroid will fly with almost unchanged path...
--
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(City of Newton, KS)...
If the asteroid is small enough you could even use the airbag to skip it off the atmosphere. I have a hard time envisioning some airbag attached to a rocket motor doing much to a larger one in time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Does this mean children under the age of twelve shouldn't be allowed in the front seat of planet earth?
to try and figure out how an airbag is supposed to do anything to deflect an asteroid. I eventually inferred that the airbag is like a catcher's mit, connected to huge rockets.
....duh.
The article could have been titled, "Huge rockets could deflect an asteroid"
I think I would still prefer nukes....they're just so much more macho.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
If you deploy the airbag in space, it will just bounce off the asteroid, since it has very little mass (it would need to have low mass in order to be launched into space). The trajectory of the asteroid wouldn't be noticably affected. If you were somehow able to prevent the airbag from bouncing off (for example, deploying it on the surface of the earth), there is still no way that a mylar bag wouldn't pop and be totally useless. Therefore, the only remaining implementation is having this airbag pushed by rockets to apply thrust to the asteroid, which is what the article suggests. However, this would be no different than just planting a rocket pointing up on the surface of the asteroid. In this scenario, the airbag is useless. This guy must've failed High School physics!
Using the word "Airbag" for this idea definitely gives people the wrong idea. An airbag is used usually to reduce the impact of a fast moving object. In the case it is used as a deflection mechanism. Perhaps the word deflection ballon would be a better combination word?
Just a thought.
Do you realize how many problems could be solved by energy shields? An energy shield deployed over a building would protect it from planes. An automobile energy shield would prevent car damage in an accident. A personal energy shield would protect you from bullets and other injuries.
And, an earth wide planetary shield would protect us from asteroids!
Scientists of tomorrow, get working on the energy shields! We need them now!
Materials Req'd:
1 Mylar Balloon (you could use the heart-shaped one that your girlfriend gave you....)
1 Slingshot
1 pair tongs
1 burner (okay, so a zippo will probably work)
1 rock/nut (something you can easily shoot with the slingshot, and will get really, really hot over the burner)
Using the tongs to hold the rock, heat it over the burner until it is very hot. If you've got some really snazzy equipment, make it glow. (IMPORTANT: DO NOT USE A SANDSTONE ROCK!) Place balloon strategically so that it blocks something valuable (like a priceless painting on the wall). Carefully using the tongs, arm the slingshot with the rock/nut. Fire the slingshot at the balloon. See how long that plastic lasts upon encountering super-heated rock or metal, and how well the object behind fared.
Repeat the experiment if you miss the balloon. Record and analyze your results.
I see, they let the asteroid bounce so it won't hit the US of A and head straight for Saddam. --Ivo
What happened to the idea of covering the asteroid with a light or dark colored dust to alter it's course? That sounded much more likely to work.
Alari
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
This is the wrong problem, in my opion; he assumes you've got massive amount of rocket fuel to wast. What we really need to do is figure out how to take some of the mass of the asteroid and accelerate it, using this as the reactant to change the path. Sort of like installing a rail gun on the asteroid, and firing off bits of asteriod like b-b's to get the asteroid to move in the opposite direction.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Nukes would tend to uncontrolably break the object up into smaller pieces; chances are some of these pieces would still strike Earth, even if the original object was going to miss. Granted, I'd rather be hit by a few 100 meter rocks than 1 big 1000 meter rock, but it's still not a satisfactory solution. Now, if you could split the object in a controllable fashion, like a diamond cutter splitting a diamond, it would be useful. Problem is, we know very little about the internal makeup of asteroids, never having been inside one.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
...but will the Moon get a passenger airbag?
This idea has been around for a little while, and unlike a lot of the posts here, it's not an airbag like in a car. The idea is to have a big bag, pushed by a rocket, deflect, not reflect the object, and all random mass around it.
Most asteroids approach at speeds of several kilometers per second. To catch them without popping, the airbag would have to fly out into space, turn around, match speeds with the asteroid, deploy (possibly not in that order) and then fire its rockets the other way to deflect it.
Wouldn't it be easier just to land on it? Or nuke it?
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Link from my rejected story. Grr.
All this talk about HOW to deflect an asteriod is wonderful, but I think many people forget that we actually have to SEE the damned thing first. Last I checked we were only monitoring a very, very, very tiny amount of the sky, and NASA's budget is still being attacked by the politicians.
You can't defend against something that you don't know is there. And I'm also willing to bet that thing thing would take some time to be deployed, so we'd probably need to see the asteriod pretty early.
Defence plans are great, but what we really need is to be watching more of the sky.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Goodbye Saddam!
(just kidding, he's my neighbor)
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
That is really, really dumb!
right up there with the "wrap the asteroid in reflective material so that the solar wind will surely push it to a safe distance.
i mean, just a FEW considerations here:
* asteroid comming in will be damn hot, burn-through bag
* inflation rate
* leakage?
* where you planning on putting it, if a metropolis like NYC, if it was gonna be hit?
* make it out of what?
* transport it how?
that's it; if this is the best our scientists can come up with; i am starting to dig my hole and buying canned soup.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Assuming it's made of air and mylar, it would burst. There is about zero pressure in space. That's why astronauts have to have spacesuits, and those spacesuits are thick and expensive as h3ll. Knowing how relatively weak mylar is, the "air"bag would burst before entered space, due to the immense pressure difference.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Everything considered, the chances of being killed by an asteroid are considered to be about one in 12,000, compared to the one in 10,000 possibility of being killed in an airline crash, he said.
hrmmm I wonder what these statistics are based on.. never heard of anyone being killed by an asteroid.
Movies aside, killer asteroids rank WAY down there on my list of worries. Lets see, what has a better chance of killing me:
1. Basement Stairs
2. Lightning
3. Bees
4. Falling coconuts (look it up, it really happens)
5. Brain embolism
6. CowboyNeal
I can only envision this working if the rock is coming it at an angle. If it is more or less strait on, then deflection would have to be almost 90 degrees. Not very likely.
Unless, the idea is to push it toward the oceans. But larger asteroids will make a mess for all regardless of where it hits.
Table-ized A.I.
Why is it that many of these plans I hear of involve some elaborate scheme which involves landing on the asteroid and using the rocket's thrust, solar sails, painting it white(yes, I've heard a "researcher" say this), or some other nonsense.
Nuking the surface is often downplayed by these said researchers as possibly making things worse by splitting it up and having more impacts(although it's a much better bet than the other plans).
The plan I only occasionally hear these researchers mention is detonating the nuke near it(either directly in front or slightly off-center). Doing this wouldn't split the asteroid into pieces, and it would have a much higher chance of working than the elaborate schemes
I see so much of these "solutions", that man there should be a top-ten list just for all the crazy/wacky ways we can avoid getting hit by an asteroid.
But this 'inflatable' airbag is the funniest of them all; even more dumber than 'zapping asteroid with a laser'. Umm, right.
Next thing you know the stuff they use in silicon breast implants will be used to ricochet asteriods...like in pinball, get it? Personally, I think we should use a force field(like the stuff you see in star trek) to block the asteriod, then use our tractor beam to pull it away from earth and throw it somewhere else...like pluto.
SCIENTIST 1: Ahh! Giant Asteroid! We're all gonna die!
SCIENTIST 2: Nonsense, we'd never be able to deflect a gargantuan asteroid with just thermonuclear warheads.
SCIENTIST 3: How about a giant bag of air then?
SCIENTISTS IN CHORUS: YEAH! THAT'S IT!
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to we
Imagine the ads for the Earth Airbag though.
If it can save the earth from an ateroid. It can save you drunken ass when you plow into a telephone pole at 75mph.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
Science: Most Beautiful Experiment in Physics
Answer: Airbags for Planetary Defence
Let's ignore the physics of a 100,000 ton rock hitting a mylar balloon for the moment. I'm more interested in how they're going to get this gas into space. I realize it can be compressed, but 3 cubic kilometers worth? Has anybody done the math here?! The only way I can see this doing a bit of good (and not really even that) is that the asteroid might be nudged off course when the bag ruptures with all it's atmosphere in a shockwave sorta thing. But then, you might as well send 50 nukes up after it... Hell, the engineering there would probably be a lot simpler... I guess, the balloon would have a certain amount elastisity to it before it bursts, giving it some impact resistance as the mylar absorbs the shock, but I have to wonder... Why even bother?
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The asteroid isn't going to be hot... because that only happens once it hits the atmosphere. ( mentioned a couple posts up ) If we actually let it get that close to the Earth, we'd be screwed anyway, because it is too close. Where are we going to put this massive balloon/bag? In space, obvioulsy, far enough away to deflect the asteroid away from the Earth. Transport it... some shuttle craft, with some inflation device, probably several weeks before the asteroid arrives, if we detect it soon enough.
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Two Things-
First I think the idea is to nudge the asteroid to the side and deflect its past, not get in front of it and have the asteroid bounce off.
Second, to accomplish this the ballon needs to bedeployed while the asteroid is still far away from earth. That will give it time to gently push it into a trajectory that doesnt collide with earth.
We do have more than one paper you know and this one isn't like our official paper :s
OK, Inject nuclear powered engines to redirect course as far as possible away from Earth. How much logic does this really take guys? --Zen
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Jiffy pop nothing! We're talking about the ultimate whoopie coshion here! :)
I once did some back-of-the-envelope calculations about deflecting asteroids with a physicist friend of mine.
Our presumed target was a 1 mile dinosaur killer that is about to hit Earth in a few months and we want to impart enough kinetic energy to change its trajectory so that by the time it reaches Earth it will miss it by a few thousand miles of safety margin.
Well, it turns out that it takes so much energy that even the biggest thermonuclear devices barely have enough energy to do it, even assuming we could convert it efficiently to kinetic energy.
A nuke going off in space is just a big flash. No real blast. You need some working mass to convert it to kinetic energy. Using the mass of the asteroid itself is dangerous because you don't want it to break into multiple fragments.
Here our calculations probably become much less accurate because we took some shortcuts and made some assumptions that may be way off, but the result we got is that we needed to send some tens of thousands of tonnes of working mass (e.g. water) along with the nuke to convert its energy to momentum with reasonable efficiency.
Needless to say, this is beyond our current launching capabilities.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Yes, I've always thought congress should do something about the risk of asteroids.
Oh, wait...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What happens when the US messes up the asteroid bouncing project and they send the asteroid directly into France?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
After all, if the asteroids already have one, why can't we?
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
take into account children in the front passenger seat of whatever vehicle could deploy this thing. But alas I guess thats obvious.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
What if the asteroid is going to miss earth (insert big sigh of relief from the scientific community) but glances the moon... Puts a little "english" on it and sends it spinning toward earth?
Is there any kind of plan in effect to deflect the moon from us?
This seems like kind of a dumb idea. $10 says I can deliver a thousand times the newtons an asteroid with a nuke. Oh, and what's with the 'Canada's newspaper' quip? Canada has TWO newspapers.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Why use mylar airbags when we've got plenty of used-up old conservatives lying around? Lets' throw Rush Limbaugh out there to protect us from asteroids...
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
There are reports that NASA is working on a solution to this problem. They're developing a small white triangular spacecraft that fires white projectiles at an oncoming asteroid, causing it to break up into smaller pieces. Then the smaller pieces are then targeted and detroyed. This continues until the fragments cease to exist. Unfortunately, seconds after the asteroid is completely destroyed, dozens more appear out of nowhere.
The Canadian paper, the National Post, is reporting on a plan...
"The" Canadian Paper? Our country does have more than one, you know. Conrad Black wasn't quite that successful.
I think the National Post intends to deploy the air bag themselves. All they have to do is get their editorial staff to open their mouths and BOOM, an inexhaustible supply of hot air. Better yet they can deploy the bag twice as fast if everyone bends over and contributes their "idea chute" as well.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Good thing Earth already has a built in air bag, it's called "the atmosphere".
... in a Yahoo! commercial?
Wouldnt it be a good idea to go out and "retrieve" other close by "rocks" and sling them in orbit around Earth. They could then be equiped with proper rockets and perhaps trimmed down to the needed size to shoot back off at new astroids in a game of intergalatic pool?
:)
All Tthat I'm suggesting is that we try keep these big rocks that fly by. They are massive objects which simply need some "redirection". Heck, I say we fight fire with fire by slinging them at each other.
The Canadian paper, the National Post, is reporting...
The phrase "the National Post" should not be a parenthetical expresson here because Canada does, in fact, have more than one news paper.
suggests deploying an inflatable mylar bag a few kilometers in size, and using it to push the projectile aside
No, what we should do is build a giant pool-cue stick and knock another asteroid into the first asteroid, deflecting it into the side pocket.
The more and more I hear about meteor showers, ways in which to bounce asteroids out of earth's path the more I believe that these ideas come to exist to milk some funding out of some sucker or to sell who knows which book. This is all schumacher levy 9's fault.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Not for nothin' but wouldn't the heat of the asteroid (from passing through atmospheric re-entry) smoke a hole in this airbag before it had a chance to absorb much force from it?
And what would they plan on inflating it with? Part of the protection of an airbag is the force of it inflating as your momentum carries you forward. It's an azide compound that generates a bunch of nitrogen gas that rapidly inflates it. It would be a hell of a chemical reaction to generate enough gas to fill a several km wide cushion. Maybe I should think of it more as one of those airbags the fire dept. uses to keep jumpers from smacking pavement?
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whats the airbag going to push aginst?
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Its sad but I spent some time there till i figured out I could leave....
I think a giant air bag would be much more effective if used in conjunction with a planetary seat belt.
We could install planetary windshield wipers for the small asteroids. I mean there is no sense is wasting a perfectly good air bag on the small stuff. I think a planetary shoulder harness would be good also but I'm not sure where to fasten it. I figure that my town is the anus of the earth so that would put the shoulder somewhere in eastern Canada I figure.
If Bush is determined to go to war with Iraq we could use that area as our planetary ash tray.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
funny, cause I just watched Apollo 13 again and they repeated repeatedly the fact that the reentry vehicle had to approach the earth on a very specific vector or else they would burn up or bounce off the atmosphere... most likely meteors have the same approach and entry window as man-made detritus.
In the end of course it only takes one large asteroid to do it right and kill us all...
carpe diem I guess...
\
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Is a huge board with a nail in it!
We just have to be careful that we don't build a board with a nail that is so big, we destroy ourselves!
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Insert "Pusher robot" above "Basement Stairs".
Or should that be the "Shover robot?"
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
early US satelite.
They called it echo becasue it was a pasive radar reflector. It was 500 ft in diameter.
What was it made of you ask?
How did they get somethig 500' in diameter into orbit you ask?
Try aluminumized mylar.
It inflated after release from the booster (probably a Redstone - I don't remember)
It took very little to inflate it in space - just a few grams of gas was sufficient.
It didn't stay in orbit too long as it also provided proof of concept for solar sails.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Everything considered, the chances of being killed by an asteroid are considered to be about one in 12,000, compared to the one in 10,000 possibility of being killed in an airline crash, he said.
Errr... wtf? The odds of my dying in an airline crash are much less than 1 in 10,000, thank you very much. Ditto for being whacked by an asteroid.
Seems like they're off by a bunch of orders of magnitude.
According to this the odds are about one in four *million*.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
Dr. Hermann Burchard should know better..
Air pressure changes as you get higher in attitude..it gets lower.. thus at thge height of deployment the amount of air and air pressure is not enough to do what he sets out to do..
Maybe he should re-take physics?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
All we need to do is send up all the Politicans. They are all airbags to being with. If that fails, we can send the lawyers and sue the damn thing into submission.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
As any Batman reader knows, a mad scientist bent on planetary vengeance could use the same pillow/sail technology to push an asteroid _into_ earth's path.
The proverbial sword cuts both ways.
And exactly how do they intend on getting a giant steering wheel into space?
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Put two or three Tahoes up there. When the asteroid runs into them, the airbags will inflate.
We've got a few in the US we can spare, I'm sure.
Oh, and needless to say, we can take the stereos and leather seats out first.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
As long as we're talking improbable ideas, I suggest we fire an orion booster equipped with a several mile long bungie cord. No, no... i know what your thinking-- Another hair-brained ballon scheme, but wait! Our chief problem is landing the booster safely on the 'roid. Fixed rockets will kill as much intercept velocity as possible and upon the astroids flyby of the booster will fire* several kilometer long bungie cords that will anchor* themselves onto the astroids surface. The lines will hopefully soak up enough of the velocity as to impart some of it to the booster, being jettisoned before the full snap back occurs (or the line(s) simply break). The booster should then be able to edge up to the 'roid, place itself and blow it off course.
;)
*Engineering uncertain, use your imagination, sport
Hell, if he can get funding for balloons, I should get funding for this!
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On that note, maybe we could also net the thing and attach a massive parachute or parasail to it and bring the thing down in a controlled manner for study.
Given I submitted this three days ago:
2002-08-28 19:40:21 Asteroids and The Giant Airbag (articles,news) (rejected)
However, here's the link to the New Scienctist Article that got the scoop.
The test:
Looking for one volunteer to stand at the end of an indoor shooting range while holding a mylar baloon in front of thier face at arms length. We will test this theory by firing a round from my SKS to see if the mylar baloon will deflect the round and keep it from hitting the volunteers face.
Why not just use the ever so famous slashdot response... hit it with the tesla death ray, or a large directed enery weapon.
Or we could just fling Rosie O'Donell at it!
Step 2: Sew bills into giant asteroid net circling globe.
Well, we could mine an asteroid and get the fissionables while they're already in space...
What happened to the , just change the mass theory. Not that long ago I remember NASA proposed a method of just taking an intense laser and trimming a few once off the mass of the asteroid, thus changing its trajectory. It seems more feasible than giant air bags.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
It looks like I have found my volunteer......
It's not like the earth is just sitting there waiting for something to hit it. If you detect a collision course, both speeding up the asteroid or slowing it down might mean the difference of several hundred thousand miles. Remember the earth is moving in orbit around the sun, so speeding up the asteroid by just a tad might make all the difference.
Like others have mentioned, what is really needed is to have a earlier forcast of where the things are headed. What's Deep Blue doing these days? Couldn't it see God's chess moves several thousand iterations into the future?
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
Small meteors burn up in the upper atmosphere.
Therefore, the problem isn't deflecting a meteor, but converting a big one into lots of small ones.
This seems like a perfect use for a nuclear bomb.
If the meteor is a dust swarm, then it will already burn up, and we don't need to do anything.
How am I wrong?
Was I the only one who thought of Sluggy Freelance's Dr. Schlock and his futuristic "inflatable technology"?
Maybe there's something to that, after all...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
It only gets hot once it hits the atomosphere. And the kevlar will hit before that.
I -had- to clear that up. =)
A number of respondents have said more or less the same thing -- that Earth is struck by small space rubble every day, with no apparent adverse effects. I have trouble with this idea.
But first, to be pedantic. If you split a .5 km berg into .25 km pieces, you get eight pieces, not two pieces. Volume increases as the cube of the radius -- you know, height, width, depth...
Here is a link I found in an earlier slashdot discussion to an article classifying the destruction from different sizes of impacting rocks. This passage discusses the difference in destructive effect of a rock large enough to pierce through the atmosphere, and strike the surface, and those smaller or less solid bergs that fragment in an airburst.
This suggests to me that 8 x 100 megaton airbursts would be worse than one 8,000 megaton groundburst.
The article says a 10 meter rock releases a blast equivalent of 100 kiloton of TNT -- about 6 or 7 x Hiroshima. The 1908 Tunguska event, the airburst of a berg about 50 meters in diameter, released the blast effect of a 16 million tons of TNT. The fireball to seen to streak across Pennsylvania this summer was less than a meter in diameter.
A 500 meter rock, massing something like 4*10^7 tons, would not wipe the Earth of life. Nor would being struck by by 40*10^7 tons of rubble. I contend it would be a mistake to shrug off either one as trivial however.
Here is a final quote: