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Armageddon... in 2014. Almost.
anetic was among several to note a story making the rounds striking fear into the hearts of many.
Armageddon will just barely miss us, so make sure to get your panic in the streets over with early.
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Time to dust off those schematics for the Orion lifter... the only thing that has the capability of lifting enough nukes into an intercept course to hit it early enough to get a good deflection vector. Of course the eco freaks won't like the idea of Orion being nuclear powered...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
What should an enterprising geek stock an underground shelter with? What would /. users suggest?
'Horizon' on the BBC covered this issue a while back - see http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/armagedd on.shtml
A quote from the link above:
Asteroids like sponges
Three years ago, the residents of Tagish Lake in northern Canada witnessed a bright explosion in the sky, as an asteroid burned up in the atmosphere above them. Jim Brook was lucky enough to find debris from the impact. The first thing he noticed was that it was far lighter than he expected it would be. Like a sponge, the chunks of debris were mostly air.
Dan Durdan makes his living by firing ball bearings at asteroid samples - meteorites - to study what happens when they are hit. When he tested samples similar to the Tagish Lake meteorite, he was surprised to see that, rather than shattering or being deflected, these less dense asteroids simply absorbed the impact of the blast.
These results were worrying. This could mean that many asteroids would not be deflected by a nuclear blast. Trying to deflect an asteroid with a blast might have no effect, and would keep it coming on its deadly trajectory.
The programme also covered an alternative solution (another quote..)
The power of the Sun
Jay Meloch has suggested a radical new way of dealing with a dangerous asteroid. He wanted a surer, more controlled way of diverting a large body - with a gentle push instead of a blast. His idea was to find a way of harnessing the biggest power source in the Solar System - the Sun.
In the same way as you can use a magnifying glass to set fire to a sheet of paper, you could focus the Sun's rays onto a point on the surface on an asteroid. The spot where the Sun's rays met would heat up, blasting particles of the asteroid into space. This would act like a rocket engine, and might be enough nudge the asteroid out of harm's way.
The scientific community ridiculed his suggestion - until Meloch received a phone call from someone who took his idea very seriously. The US military already uses collectors like Meloch's to gather radio waves. Meloch may well have come up with a suggestion that will one day save the Earth.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
15 March 2005: The object will be .082 AU from earth.
24 September 2012: The object will pass within 0.098 AU of earth.
I also noticed (if I am reading the orbital diagrams correctly) that the points where the object is closest to the earth coincide with the points where the object passes through the plane of the ecliptic. Since these are the Acending / Decending nodes of a solar orbit, wouldn't this point be ideal for a change of orbital plane? I'm thinking these near-Earth encounters may change the object's orbit somewhat, since surely the earth encounters will impart some delta-v on the object.
Anyone else up on orbital mechanics care to take a better look at the ephermis?