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Assessing Asteroid Threat
Makarand writes "According to a proposal submitted to
the European Space Agency a fleet of
five mini-probes
should be sent each targeting an asteroid
considered potentially dangerous.
The mission objective will be to learn more about dangerous near earth objects so that we can plan how best to respond when under threat.
Once in space, the probes would use ion propulsion engines that provide thrust by shooting out a stream of electrically
charged particles. Power for the ion engines would be provided by ultra-lightweight solar arrays.
Each probe will carry instrumentation to learn about the physical and chemical make-up of the target. The mission would cost around $150 mil
which is quite low according to space mission standards."
After watching the news or reading a paper, I find myself rooting for the asteroids.
--- Ban humanity.
I thought I fixed this problem years ago with my Atari!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Only an optimist wuld believe that the U.N would commit to a path of aggression, until all diplomatic options had been exhausted. The asteroids must be convinced to disarm themselves.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Some VC has a Neat Idea, which nobody wants. Is that his fault, no! Who will buy it - Governments, they can print as much money as they need. Of course this was done in Europe, their monopoly-money machines work better than in the US (Russia has no money, monopoly or otherwise).
Here's how you really get rid of an asteroid:
Insert used ICBM into Space Shuttle (or equivalent)
Place ICBM and suitable launch device into LOE.
Aim ICBM at the place where the asteroid will be when it gets there.
Press the button that we've wanted to push for so long. Sell tickets, I'm sure the Russians would want to attend - maybe a joint "button pushing" ceremony? Heck, bring the Chinese and N.Koreans in too.
Watch as ICBM blows up asteroid.
Profit!
(Part where it ushers in a new sense of global peace and brotherhood is optional)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Here in the UK there was a TV documentary (probably BBC2 Horizon, not sure) about asteroid impacts, how to deal with them and so on. I for one thought it was much like Arthur C Clarke's Hammer of God - find it early, deliver an impulse, deflect it a teeny weeny bit, and it misses by a few miles. Nope. The asteroid could be very porous, it just absorbs the blast, or requires an impossibly big bang to be sure it deflects. So sending probes to gather facts about asteroid composition is a good and useful practical thing over and above the scientific justification.
That is the raw translation of a hungarian novel written in the early 80's.
It takes place in the near future when the Earth population is 10 billion. An asteroid threatens Earth, but so big nothing can be done just one thing. By calculating the trajectory of the asteriod the engineers notice that it nearly collide another, but smaller asteroid.
So, they send up a spaceship with full of explosives and ram it into the small asteroid in order to give it a push which is sufficient to make it collide with the big one.
Billiard on the cosmic scale. And it was written well before the public became aware of the asteriod threat.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Each Simone spacecraft will have instruments designed to examine the physical and chemical make-up of its target asteroid. It is hoped the missions will help scientists predict the risk posed by asteroids and develop effective strategies for dealing with different types of object.
What properties, other than mass and trajectory, are of interest? It's not like they're going to find harmless ones made out of rubber or whatever.
Pretty smart using Simon to stop the asteroid... "Simon says jump on one foot. Simon says don't hit the Earth..."
Next on /. how to save Earth from an Alien attack using the Hockey-Pockey
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Now, one might argue that if we knew things like chemical make up or density or the like we might know how to destroy the object or perhaps could change it's trajectory with engines or a tractor beam or something. However, this implies that we know the object exists with enough advance notice to do something. To plan a research encounter, that might be a year. To plan a destructive encounter, I think that might be a month. I seem to remember that the in the last near miss, we did not detect the object until after it had passed.
Which is to say that we need better detection technology coupled with serious research of how to change trajectory. I do not believe converting a single projectile into hundred of projectiles is a reasonable solution. And of course, if we don't know the object is coming, there is nothing we can do
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"Why Jupiter, who's size compared to Earth is immense, has not had a large asteroid annihalate it yet? (ok, maybe it has, i don't know)"
It has been hit, very spectacularly, had it been Earth that was hit I doubt we would be discussing this.
See:
Comet Shoemaker-Levy Collision with Jupiter
Considering the amount of money spent on practising for war every year - "defense", the proposal to the EU is peanuts. It is a proposal to start investigating the possibilities of a very real threat. I seem to recall the Siberian meteor impact as estimated as equivalent to about a 30MT H-bomb, and we were very lucky it hit where it did. It also seems that satellite photography is identifying more and more impact sites on the Earth. When I was a kid very few of these were recognised, and it seems reasonable to me that if we are learning that the frequency of such hits is much higher than expected, we should start to do something.
It's also worth remembering that the big impact on Jupiter occurred only a few years ago, and that very visible impact may well have concentrated people's minds. As telescopes get better, astronomers are realising there is far more debris out there than anybody knew- the old idea of 9 tidy planets and an asteroid belt has turned into a solar system full of all kinds of junk, moonlets, comet formation belts- the Solar System seems to be more like Mexico City than Singapore, if you see what I mean.
A billion dollars sound like a lot, but how much is the ABM system going to cost?
Dealing with a hard rock or a dirty snowball could need very different approaches (gentle push versus big bang?). Just because a multi-mile wide asteroid could be undeflectable and fatal, doesn;t mean that the real threat might come from a thing 100M across - obviously deflectable with the right technology, but nuking it could result in thousands of destructive small impacts.
To sum up this ramble:
- Destructive meteor impacts do occur on Earth
- Some of them are potentially preventable
- The cost of research is probably going to be far less than the US is going to spend developing nuclear warheads this year
- The cost of stopping a small asteroid could be a lot less than the estimated budget for stopping Saddam Hussein
- All in all, it looks far from a waste of EU money.
Thank you for reading this far.Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
For several reasons. The primary, of course, is so we know what methods will work best for moving the asteroid's orbit enough so it doesn't hit. Secondly, knowing it's composition will allow us to better estimate it's effect. A mostly silicon (sand-ball) asteroid will have different impact characteristics than a lead/iron 'bullet'.
I don't read AC A human right