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Defending Earth From Asteroids With MADMEN
jolomo writes "A partner of Atlanta-based NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts is working on a concept they call MADMEN (Modular Asteroid Deflection Mission Ejector Nodes), which would launch a distributed attack against large Earth-bound objects. Thousands of MADMEN could be built by many nations and when launched, each would land on the object, drill into its surface and remove enough material to change its course."
If you want to see this effect try this (a teacher told me about that 10 years ago):
on a day without wind go in a light boat with something like 300 pounds of rocks. Go in the middle of a lake and launch all the rocks in the same direction as far as possible. After a while you'll notice that the boat is moving slowly in the opposite direction (depending on the weight and speed of the launches).
Nice trick that makes lot of sense in vaccum, with hundreds of 'rock launchers' and continous launches over a very long time.
As we say in French, "toute action entraine une reaction".
Iraq: war to save the U
would be more interesting to attach the MADMEN to earth and see if we can go somewhere. Where we are is getting boring...
"The next generation of interesting software will be made on a Macintosh, not an IBM PC." -Bill Gates
Will the MADMEN be good enough to stop say.... The moon gets hit by an asteroid knocking it off course and towards the earth.
So, maybe I played too much pool as a kid.
Evolution or ID?
My favorite approach that I've heard so far is to paint the asteroid while its still a long way out. You paint one half to absorb radiation and leave the other side alone. The idea is that after long enough the sun will push the asteroid off course.
What kind of goofy people come up with this stuff?
My second favorite is to put rocket engines on lots of little asteroids and crash them into the big asteroid coming for earth. Some lucky bastard would get paid to sit in his chair at NASA with a joystick and play asteroids.
Imagine the pressure!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Food for thought:
1) With such a system in place, would the United States be morally or legally bound to intervene if an asteroid was destined (for example) Cuba, or North Korea?
2) Can such as system also be used to DIVERT or even AIM such a projectile as a weapon?*
*(If it helps you sleep, you can answer this to yourself as "it saved millions of lives and cut short the war by several years". You know what I am talking about)
Posted AC, because I work for The Man sometimes.
It's a shot in a million, but if it happens we're toast. I'd like to know that there's a backup plan.
Granted, most space-based weaponry capable of taking out an asteroid would also be pretty effective against ground targets, or other countries' ballistic missiles.
...
Asteroid (meteor?) strikes are more common than you'ld think; just in 1908 what was probably a comet struck Siberia with the force of a good-sized atom bomb and leveled 1200 square miles of forest. Had an inhabited area been struck, destruction would have been massive.
Our best estimates seem to be this this is likely to happen every few hundred years; given that such an event might kill millions, it seems worth a minimal effort to take out a bit of insurance, and at least as sensible as banning GMOs.
Archimedes is said to have declared that long time ago.
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No, it will probably be liek "This island Earth" where the aliens use asteroids to attack other planets. Go to asteroid belt, get big rock, throw at planet, return to belt to get more. We are defending oursleves from alien invaders when we prevent asteroid strikes. Of course, any alien race that can get here will probably just kick our asses the odl fashioned way when asteroids fail anyway. DOn't believe me? Think Gort x 1,000,000...
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Wouldn't it be esasier to build a large rail gun on the moon that could shoot projectiles into the asteroid instead? This would save the trouble of having to deal with the problems with what would be the equivilant of thousands of Mars landers.
Consider instead a high power microwave source ionizing the mass that would have previously been cut into golf ball pieces, then using a particle accelerator instead of a mass driver. If the ion temperature is kept high enough, you'll only have pure ions to deal with, nice and conductive, and easier to control. You can then ship them out along the thrust vector of your choice, without the headaches of mechanical processing of materials.
Electrohydrodynamic accelleration of mass can be studied in labs on the ground, thus reducing R&D costs. It also offers the advantage of being throttled to any desired rate. In the hard vacuum of space, it should be feasible to keep the ions from contacting, and thus eroding the accelerator.
The mass will eventually condense back to solid matter, but will be quite dispersed by the time that happens, thus creating dust, instead of solid projectiles.
--Mike--
Even a small impact of a cometary fragment such as that that happened over Tunguska would be devastating if it happened in a populated area.
Question: Suppose such an event happened over a populated area today. How long would the authorities of that nation wait before retaliating against their enemies for what looks, to a layperson's eye, an awful lot like a nuclear strike?
And is that time longer or shorter than the time it would take the scientific community to conclude that it wasn't a nuclear strike and convey that information to the leaders of the rocksmacked nation?
And would the population of the nation actually believe what the scientists were saying?
That's if the world's lucky enough that the rock in question lands in a nation that even has scientists.
What would the world be like had the Tunguska event occurred in 1968 instead of 1908?
I've noticed from my University experience that astronomers are quite mad. Other acronyms they've come up with:
WIMP = Weakly Interacting Massive Particles
MACHO = MAssive Compact Halo Object
It is almost inevitable that any incoming rock will be rotating on all 3 axes. To move it efficiently would require these beasties being smart enough to know when to throw their rock. That's doable.
But how often will one of these things be in the right place at the right time? You would need hundreds if not thousands sitting and digging and waiting their turn.
How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max.
If that thing isn't going to get the chance to launch 1000 one pound chuncks of rock, due to not being pointed in the right direction often enough, you'd do better to slam the things into the rock to try to move it.
I think the best idea yet is building a bunch of large engines and fuel tanks, going out and capturing some rocks, herding them into stable orbit at L-4, and strap on the engines. If they're ever needed they can easily fall out of L-4, slingshot around the moon, and head out towards the incoming. A properly placed kinetic swat will send it off into a safe orbit whether or not it breaks up.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Mt. St. Helens, Riight.. despite a large conspicuous bulge on the side and lots of seismic activity some fools chose to stay. When warnings were issued they chose to stay. When forest rangers blockaded roads, morons drove around them.
Helens did us a favor Darwinning these idiots.
All the members of the nuclear club increased the size of their nuclear arsenals without regard to their treaty obligations. And the USA won. The USA is the pre-eminent super-power now because it won the Arms Race. It wouldn't be the pre-eminent super-power if the smart bombs were not backed up by a nuclear arsenal. It wouldn't be the pre-eminent super-power if the B2 wasn't backed up by a nuclear arsenal.
Oh yeah, there was another clause in the non-proliferation treaty. Part of the Quid Pro Quo was that the nations with Nuclear power were supposed to make sure the nations without Nuclear power shared in the benefits of Nuclear Power. We haven't see much of that happening, have we?
Look, it's this simple: Asteroids ROTATE, in wildly different ways and have a miniscule amount of local gravity.
How on earth is your loauncher supposed to touch down, let alone anchor itself? Then, if that can be achieved, how does it know which direction and when to chuck a load? Unless ALL units are completely sorted out, randonly chucking stuff off a rock is a waste of time - the combined effects will cancel eacg other out.
Look, this isn't rock(et) science - this is Laser Science. :P
The best and ONLY viable way to divert asteroids is to hit them with light pressure. Nuclear bombs and rock-chucking bots are the legacy thinking from military minds, and not logical thinking.
Here's how to divert a rock:
Launch a 500 Megawatt Nuclear reactor into orbit, and attach it to a giant "Laser Beam". Use a high power ION drive to get the system into a position where it leads the asteroid by a few thousand klicks. It then positions itself such that it can place 500 Megawatts of laser power onto the surface of the asteroid, pushing in one direction only.
It sits there for a few years pushing on the asteroid, while using the ION engine to hold it's position (Newton says action = reaction!). We send several missions to refuel the ION engines and tend the reactor.
You only need to adjust an asteroids speed by 2 cm/s to effectively make it miss the Earth - and we'd want even less than that, because we'd want to actually snatch the thing into a highly elliptical Earth Orbit. Say 2,000,000 x 450 Kilometres.
Then we'd not only save the Earth, but snag a trillion tons of raw materials which can gradually be mined and used by the burgeoning space manufacturing and orbital processing facilities which will bound to develop if that much "free" material is just sitting there asking to be used.
Alternatively, and arguably easier is to use Gigawatt class lasers (which perform multiple duties: launching payloads into LEO, illuminating search and rescue efforts at night, light battlefields, accelerate interstellar probesm send data into the cosmos, a Ballistic Missile defence syste, providing light in the Luna night, satelite killer, surgical strike weapon par-excellence, space junk de-orbiter and asteroid diverter!) based on Earth to deflect incoming NEOs.
Earth based is preferable because it's cheaper and has many other uses. Plus, you can build 50+ Gigawatt class lasers and combine the power which would deflect objects the sizes of Ceres.
1x Gigawatt is the power required to launch a 1 metre diameter, 1 ton payload into Low Earth Orbit. Check out http://www.lightcrafttechnologies.com/ This from Liek Mayabo the CEO.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I don't have the answer to this. Scenarios I consider: 1. An asteroid whose path through space is essentially tangent to the Earth's orbit, and is coming head on. How many days warning might we have? How could we get anything to it an appreciable distance from Earth? 2. An Asteroid whose path is perpendicular to the plane of Earth's orbit. Same questions. In either of these two scenarios, unless you could get a year or more's worth of warning you could never position a defender. Accelerating to high speed to get into position kinda prevents landing on one of these bodies- you'd have to decelerate, then reverse direction and accelerate up to the body's speed. Even worse, you're coming from a bad angle - if the body is going to hit you in three months, you have to launch a defender to essentially where the earth will be in three months - that's a lot of distance. Given a few minutes with google, you could work out the distance the defender would have to cover (thus it's speed), and the acceleration it would have to accomplish to match it's speed and path to that of the incoming asteroid. Seems to me the only scenario this works with is asteroids more-or-less in earth's orbit that get bumped into a collision course, or comet-like bodies with a predictable period where we can pre-position defenders.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Ever consider that the dinosaurs might still rule the Earth if they had MADMEN?
That's an interesting point you bring up. It makes me wonder, how would today's Earth have evolved if the dinosaurs had never been wiped? Would the planet be ruled by huge, smart reptiles? Or perhaps dumb ones?
Perhaps the occasional cataclysm is beneficial to the planet in the long run, by wiping out species that have hit (or are approaching) some sort of evolutionary wall. If humans were similarly wiped by an asteroid, would something still more advanced evolve in our absence?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
One question:
Where did you get "thousands of nations" from "thousands of MADMEN could be built by many nations"?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.