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."

Comments

hey!

[Joe the Lesser]

I thought I fixed this problem years ago with my Atari!

optimistic fools!

[new death barbie]

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.

Different types of object?

[spakka]

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.

Re:One has to question

[Memetic]

"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

A lot of negativism

[panurge]

A lot of the arguments so far seem to be of the "why give up smoking, I might fall under a bus" variety. From the same people that continue to buy SUVs?

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.