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Planetary Defense: Protecting Earth from Asteroids
securitas writes "Space.com has published a feature about developing a planetary defense against catastrophic comet and asteroid impacts. The story arises from the aptly named 'Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids' held in California February 23-26. The article discusses potential methods to prevent an impact, the need for study missions to comets and asteroids, the to-date haphazard approach to monitoring Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and the NASA/US Air Force Spaceguard Survey, which aims to discover and track 90% of 'Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with a diameter greater than 0.6 miles (1-kilometer) by 2008.' Some ideas for anti-impact technologies to develop include gas blasts, nuclear detonations, ramming microsatellites, lasers, mass drivers and gravitational tractor beams. The most disturbing message from the conference? 'It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger. Mirror at USA Today."
Not sure about everyone else, but humans as a whole we have many more earth bound issues that require our attention. Famine, disease, and war are way more important, and require more of our attention.
Could we eliminate any risk of being hit by an asteroid by reclassifying everything as a planet?
I think one thing that is interesting is how the movie industry already touched upon this. Quite often the movie industry because of their ability to think outside of the box is able to come up with scenarios that ordinarily wouldnt be thought of or addressed. A quite clear example is how the US government after sept 11th hired some movie writers to help look at security holes or lapses that could potentially be exploited. I guess the question remains though are we going to then follow hollywoods ideas on how to address such threats?
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
> The most disturbing message from the conference? 'It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger.
Just like every other problem?
And even then, it isn't so much likely to be "meaningful" as to be "just enough to convince the public we're doing something about it".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
With Bruce Willis getting older and Ben Affleck not as tough as he used to be, its good that we're researching out other options. Yuck. Yuck.
gravitational tractor beams.
Personally I don't know why this wasn't thought of first before all those silly ideas like just blowing something up
A nice large tractor beam from a high orbiting satellite to repel or attract any asteroid or other thing that's going to hit the planet, and problem solved.
Of course, there's the technical side...
Come on, editors- this is news? We have already researched laser technology, so SDI defense is available. It should only take 2 or 3 turns to equip all of our cities with this technology.
I think we should simply rely on older technology to solve this problem. Don't fix it if it ain't broke...
None of our earth-borne problems are going to make one whit of difference if an asteroid hits us.
There won't be a welfare problem anymore, because there won't be anyone left to be on welfare.
Jim
Shortly before Carl Sagan died, he wrote an article in Parade Magazine about how he felt this was a bad idea. His premise being that a rouge government or terrorist organization could use technology like this to turn a "near miss" into a direct hit. Which could be potentially far more destructive than a nuke. Obviously he's looking well into the future. But I think he has point.
Risks of dying in car: 1 in 100
Risks of dying in plane:1 in 20,000
Risks of dying from asteroid 1 in 20,000 to 100,000
Source
May I just get somebody to help me pay off my student loans and make sure that there is enough social security to cover my health when I get old?
AC
Famine, disease, and war are way more important, and require more of our attention.
Famine, disesase, and war could all be ended in a moment -- by a sufficiently large asteroid.
Gallows humor aside, I'm sorry to say it but: why should we realistically expect an end to famine, disease, war? They've been with us throughout history. Man has always wished to eliminate these woes -- yes they keep getting worse and worse.
At least there's the possibility that a technological fix might save us from asteroid impact. Give me some reason to believe that there's any kind of fix for war etc.
-kgj
-kgj
Back in April 2002, the UK government started to fund a centre studying both the near-earth-orbit rocks we know about, and ways of increasing awareness and detection rates, as well as investigating possible protection strategies.
Personally I think it's just playing at people-politics, at least in the form the UK has done it $600k isn't going to go very far, but it's a relatively cheap purchase of public goodwill... On the other hand, at the moment I'll take what we can get.
There's a tiny chance of life as we know it being destroyed. A really tiny chance, and one thing humans aren't good at is disaster-planning - even when the potential result is extinction, the "gut-feeling" is to say "it'll never happen", because none of us have any experience of it happening. This is short-sighted, we should be doing something.
Although I don't think there's any reason to panic about it, the last great ecosystem was destroyed by (perhaps two, perhaps 1) asteroid, as far as we know. Researching, thinking, creating plans would probably be a good idea, at least IMHO.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyN ews/asteroid0107.html
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http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/I7.ht
http://home.att.net/~thehessians/asteroidstrike
http://www.sandia.gov/media/comethit.htm
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/crater.h
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
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As practically a deathbed speech, he educated me about those concepts and who the players were in this game. He gave me the responsibility, since he was dying, of continuing this effort to prevent the weaponization of outer space.
Be sure your Tin Foil hats are well groundedWhen Wernher Von Braun was dying of cancer, he asked me to be his spokesperson, to appear on occasions when he was too ill to speak. I did this. What was most interesting to me was a repetitive sentence that he said to me over and over again during the approximately four years that I had the opportunity to work with him.
He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had "killer satellites". We were told that they were coming to get us and control us-that they were "Commies."
Then terrorists would be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot about terrorism. Then we were going to identify third-world country "crazies." We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.
The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.
Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.
And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card.
"And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie."
I think I was too naive at that time to know the seriousness of the nature of the spin that was being put on the system. And now, the pieces are starting to fall into place. We are building a space-based weapons system on a premise that is a lie, a spin. Wernher Von Braun was trying to hint that to me back in the early 70's and right up until the moment when he died in 1977.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
To be completely flippant (and yes, I do realize there is a risk, I just think it is relatively low) ... boring! I just hope this doesn't turn into another cause where misguided celebrities drive us into spending money on it disproportionally like certain trendy diseases.
Just to be pessimistic; I'm sure if anyone ever manage to agree on some way to protect the earth from celestial bodies, it will be in the form of some weapon that is capable of destroying the whole planet before anything else can hit it.
Ruthless men control the weapon's industry, and the weapon's industry controls the money that goes to persuade the desicion makers.
It would be better, at least more senisble, to let the heavenly bodies decide our fate, than these fellows.
For anyone who doesn't know, Lembit Opik[1] (Google will tell you all you want to know about him) was very largely responsible for getting this issue onto the political agenda.
Last time I was in the same room as him he was asked "OK, now you've got the politicians taking this seriously, when we spot one of these beggars coming towards us what do we do about it?"
His reply was that that wasn't his area of expertise; once politicians were taking the threat seriously they'd allocate money to the scientists and engineers, and a solution, if one were possible at all, was a done deal.
His lecture on how he got the politicians to take him seriously is well worth listening to; but actually I've found him rather good as a comic lecturer on several other subjects as well.
[1] Oh, and I'm sure slashdot geeks knew already that the "Oort cloud" is just shorthand for the "Oort-Opik cloud".
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Man, that Arthur C. Clarke is portentious - first we run out of Greek and Roman mythology to name astronomical bodies after, and now we're discussing building a planetary defense against asteroids?
It's all there in "Rendezvous with Rama." Just remember, the Ramans do everything in threes.
Hmmmm...Top Raman...
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
It would be a cosmic joke for us to have made it these past hundreds of thousands of slow years, only to be wiped out by a dumb rock in the next ~30 years or so that matter most in our evolution to post-humanity.
--
Power to the Peaceful
The ultimate defense for humanity and all the rest of the life on this planet, of course, is to terraform and colonize Mars. That way, even if a planetary defense system fails and Earth gets pulverized, life lives on on the surface of Mars.
How To Get Humans To Mars
AFAIK, it's been scientifically proven that they can stop asteroids, although they sometimes die in the attempt. Perhaps a reserve of actors could be established, similar to the national guard?
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I, for one, root for the asteroid.
--- Ban humanity.
A water impact would be far worse than a land impact, according to the people who've tried to make estimates. A land impact would glow white for a long time and radiate much of the impact energy back into space. A water impact would dump much more energy into the atmosphere.
Though realistically, the most damaging place for an Tunguska-sized impact would be in the India-Pakistan area during a crisis, or just about any time in the Middle East. It could easily be mistaken at first for a nuclear explosion. All it would take would be one decision-maker jumping to a conclusion without waiting for the radiation readings, and even a small impact could trigger a horror that would make the twentieth century look good by comparison.
I will admit that as a general nerd and space geek (I own a telescope) I am concerned about the possibility of the human population getting wiped out by a large space-borne impact.
But isn't it sad that governments throw billions of dollars towards defense (from other humans) yet nobody is willing to invest in defense of the earth at large?
This is the kind of shit that makes us look awfully silly when the aliens come inspect the rubble after the impact.
The first thing they need to do is shoot down Sedna so that our textbooks don't need to be changed.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, I've met the CEO of the weapon maker I work for, and he's hardly ruthless. Good pool player, though.
--- Ban humanity.
What SPF do I need for that threat?
In this modern age, it is good to be reminded that you should look out for the simple stuff - like rocks falling on you.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
and include a Quasar Cannon! Yeah, that's it =:-)
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
getting hit by an asteroid might not be so bad... for those left it will be much easier to get "first post", for instance.
Here's the gameplan: control Earth from space. How to do it: pretend to protect against asteroids while developing an offensive strike capability. Explore near earth asteroids. Capture one. Guide it around the sun. Hurl it back to earth and drop it on your enemy. Instant population control.
News Flash:
An asteroid has just hit Affrica and wiped out 90% of it's population. (There goes famine.) The impact has also spewed massive ammounts of dust into the atmosphere and Global Tempertures are dropping (so much for global warming) and we are expecting winter to last for several years. () We are expecting most plantlife on the planet to die off due to lack of sunlight from the dust, and a mass extinction of animals from starvation after that. (ah well, no more animals, no more animal rights activists.) Humanity is expected to follow suit being unable to feed enough of it's population due to not being able to grow anything. Wars develope over the remaining food supplies and total anihaltion results, or some survive and we are back in the stone age.
Water Impact:
An ateroid hit the (Pacific/Atlantic, your choice) today causing 1,000 foor (300 meter) tidal waves along the coastlines of all the continents (unless it was in the atlantic, in which Australia is safe). Millions of people were drowned as the water went 10's (100's?) of miles inland causing flooding and destruction of everything in it's path. Need I go on about what a 30' (10 meter) Tsunami can do? Much less one 30 times taller, occuring all over the ocean at once? Entire Islands would go under, possibly entire contries (Carribean, New Zealand, Japan, etc...). The only place that would be safe would be the mountains (Like the Rockies the Andes,and the Alps). Plus what all that water vapor would do.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
You know what's insignificant in the grand scheme of things? The amount of time humans have been on this planet. So far, the earth hasn't been destroyed by a planet-killing meanie, and neither have any of the other planets in our solar system. Assuming we'll be around another 10 or 20 thousand years, do you really think there's that much danger we're going to be hit with something in the next 50 years when we haven't been hit with something in MILLIONS of years?
Jesus H Christ. Leave it to humans to think the world would end as soon as they came into existance. And leave it to their egos to think they could do anything about it.
What should be considered is the probability that an asteroid large enough to destroy the human race will hit the earth. I think such a thing is, needless to say, pretty astronomical. (When was the last time a big one hit? Back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth maybe?)
Everyday something hits earth, comets, mini asteroids, space dust. Most burns up in the atmosphere, but every so often something makes it through (meteorites) and hits the surface. True most of these meteorites are about the size of a golf ball or smaller.
I don't have time to comment my code, the program is late already.
But once one hits we'll be safe again for another 100,000 years, right? ;)
All these articles about impending doom -- asteroids, earthquakes, pandemics, etc. -- give one the idea that because we've gone a long time without one of these things happening, the chance that we'll have an occurrance is increasing. That shows a basic misunderstanding of probability. If you toss a fair coin and get heads 50 times in a row, the probability of getting heads the next time is still 50%.
We're not 'running out of time' just because we've gone a long time without a major impact. The chance of a major impact this year is exactly the same as it has been in each of the last million years.
GEORDI: You have a better idea... ?
Q: I would certainly begin by examining the cause and not the symptom.
GEORDI: We've done that, Q... and there's no way to determine...
Q: This is obviously the result of a large celestial object passing through at near right angles to the plane of the star system...probably a black hole...
DATA: Can you recommend a way to counter the effect?
Q: Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe.
Jonathanjk.com
Destroying black holes by pouring money into them.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
You don't understand stats
The probability that an impact will occur within the decade is 50%. No more no less. It either happens or it doesn't happen.
Excuse me? Who doesn't understand stats? Just because an event can happen or not happen in a given time frame does not make the probability of that event 50%. By that reasoning I could say that either I'll win the lottery next week, or I won't therefore my odds are 50% (I wish).
An event with a 10% probability still happens or doesn't happen. Maybe I just don't understand what you're trying to say.... Like the rest of the post though.
To say that probability of something uncertain happening is "50% No more, no less" is a classic trap in misunderstanding the meaning of probability. Because an event has two possible states (does occur, does not occur) does NOT mean the probability of it occurring is 50%...This is degenerate and wrong thinking in probability. The best estimate of the probability of something happening is exactly equal to the rate at which that event occurred previously. This is called the base rate or prior probability and is integral to Bayes' theorem (please see this). Thus, if you flip a coin (of unknown fairness) 100 times and 41 of those flip come up heads, what's the best estimate of the probability that the next flip will be heads? 41%. [Side note: There are tests to determine if this rules out the coin being fair or not, but even these assume some a priori criterion for ruling out chance effects (i.e., "I'll call it unfair if the coin's pattern is likely to happen by chance less than 5% of the time"...this is called the "alpha level" of such tests).]
Anyway, there is a special distrubtion to describe the occurrence of random events in time (the Poisson distribution), but suffice it to say, the probability of an asteroid hitting the earth in the next decade is NOT 50%. This would only be true if, in the past, an asteroid has hit the earth (on average) once every other decade.
Exactly. It's fascinating to read one day on Slashdot on how the Chicago fire might've been caused by a comet and then seeing the replies to this article where people seem to claim we don't need to worry at all.
On the contrary - lots of things during the last 1000 years might be due to "cosmic" events. We have very little (popular) knowledge about quite drastic environmental changes like the "little ice age" or even the years without the sun that might've been the cause for the nickname "dark ages" (also a comet).
it's in my head
"It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger."
Wait a minute... Whose hands are being tied by an antispace weapons poliferation treaties again?? Bush had to dissolve one of those just to get a ballistic missile shield off the ground, let alone something that will actually project weapons into space. And when we do turn our backs on another one of these assnine treaties (and make no mistake, they are assinine), just remember that quote, because whining bitchasses will crawl out of the woodwork to label the US with emperialistic tendancies and world domination theories. AGAIN. We haven't even mentioned the tree-nazies absolute paranoia of putting nuclear anything into space.
I really don't think the government would mind implimenting this project and others like it. Half (if not more) of the problem is the sorry external opposition to such measures, in addition to those who will hammer the administration for ponying up the cash to make it a reality. As soon as they do, you'll hear the statistics of how unlikely it is an asteroid will hit and how we could be spending that money helping the childern!
Perhapse it's partially the fed's fault, but you have a lot of hipocrites out there complicating the issue by serveral magnitudes both inside and outside this country. That quote is ignorant and indicative of a lazy thought process considering their are a lot more parties involved in this- both domestic and ineternational -that desperatly need that wake-up call.
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My only concern is that must of what's on the table for "anti-asteroid" technology is, not surprisingly, the same technology being proposed for "US military domination of space". If it weren't for the recent Bush/Rumsfeld/PNAC/Iraq shenanigans I might give the government the benefit of the doubt. However, I'm dubious about this whole concept.
I think that humans should focus on getting off this planet. There are millions of earth-like worlds out there, just waiting for us. As long as we're stuck here on Earth, we have all our eggs in one basket.
Personally, I think that this will happen in my lifetime. With nanotech gaining speed, it won't be long before the first space elevator is built. That technology will facilitate space-based research in biosphere technologies: hydroponics, solar energy, and efficient recycling.
I don't doubt that an asteroid would collide with Earth. Hopefully the inhabitants of the planet won't be at war at the time and will be able to properly respond to the threat and prevent the destruction of humanity's birthplace. But by that time, I imagine humans will be living in hundreds of worlds - still at war with each other, but not vulnerable to a single asteroid.
Seems like it would be a lot easier to move it into a stable orbit that to destroy it.
It would be a great way to build an interplanetary ISP without all the expense of hauling materials up from the gravity well.
Also, it would make a swell military base to be used against those sneaky aliens.
That reasoning will hold true for time-invariant random events, but the fact is that the asteroids up there move. Hence it can be more probable now than it was then (but I'd still like to see some evidence...maybe I'll RTFA...).
A good example would be if we observed an asteroid on course to hit earth. If the asteroid is a year away, it would be foolish to say that it is equally probable that earth would be hit by an asteroid this month as it would the month 12 months from now.
Even if we observed the asteroid on course to hit earth, it is still only a finite probability that it would hit earth because we cannot know the true course the asteroid would take exactly. So you would include a margin of error in your projections. We can use this margin of error to determine the probability. You find the range of the projection that would include earth getting hit and integrate the probabilities to find the current probability. That's at least the basics of it. In a real example you wouldn't have the probabilities of every possible deviation so you would have to assume a probability density for it (probably gaussian) and integrate that (or look it up in a table) to get the actual probability.
Of course if we don't know of any asteroids that are coming close to earth, the best we can probably do is the prior probability. But given the limited sampling time it's really a shot in the dark.
Note: by limited sampling time I was talking about how long we have been measuring meteor strikes...which hasn't been but infinitesimal part of the earth's lifetime. We may have evidence from rocks and remnants of craters, but there's no way we can know how many meteors fell without leaving evidence that we can examine today (meteors that land in the ocean leave smaller craters, and the earth is mostly ocean).
Actually in 1960, the US Navy sent the Trieste with 3 Navy personel to 'Challenger Deep' at the southern end of the Marianas Trench. At 10,920m (about 7 miles) deep it is the deepest known point on the planet.
Also what do you mean it's a simple tech problem?? Are you nuts? It's a fucking immense tech problem. Your talking about changing the trajectory of a piece of rock that could concievably be the size of a fucking state. In space where there's no stabilizing solid like the earth to exert on it's a serios problem. And why is this all of a sudden an either/or type thing? Do you think the people that know astrophysics are the same people that understand world economics??
Statistically it's gonna happen eventually. When it does what do you want the reaction to be, "hey, didn't they build something for that a while back..." or "uh....fuck". Knowones saying if we don't do this right now were all gonna die so throw your arms in the air and run screaming it's the apocylipse blah blah blah. But it's something to think about. Were not the first species that reigned supreme on this planet, but I'd certainly like to be the last.
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
The easy way to protect earth is simply to ensure that Bruce Willis never dies... freeze him if we have to. Then thaw him out, and he can go to the rock and blow it up with three minutes to spare, and none of us need every worry again... having Tea Leoni won't help, she will just go to the beach and die... so its Bruce all the way.
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence you ever tried.
We should actually try to blow up or divert a real near earth asteroid so we know which strategy works and which is a waste of effort. That way, when (not if) the real situation arises we will know what to do.
1. INCOMING! ...
2. Fire nuke
3. Oh, just a false positive
4. Nuke comes down on (afghanistan|iraq|...)
5. Oh, well
But we don't know what causes asteroids to wander our way, only that it hapens on a semi periodic basis. Perhaps as we orbit the galaxy we come accros regions with more gravitational distortions that are more likely to send stuff hurtling inwards from the oort cloud. Perhaps there is a misterious 10th planet that goes through a dense part of the oort cloud. Perhaps....
Anything that makes the system non-memoryless (i.e. statefull) and makes the events more periodic than random allows us to say that given no events so far, the probability of an event in the near future is greater/has gone up. (Extreme example: We arrive in london at some random time and don't have a watch. The fact that Big Ben hasn't rung in the last 40 minutes allows us to state that it will ring 'soon' with greater certanty than the fact it hasn't rung in the last 10.)
Of couse the fact that an asteroid doesn't hit in just one year makes the already small probability change for the next year only by an infentesmal ammount. I.e. a change of 1/50000000 --> 1/49999999 or even smaller.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
this asteroid simulator
(developed by NASA) shows just how easy asteroid defense can be, given timing, positioning, thruster movements, etc.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
There's mention of the big buck$ LSST telescope, and a proposal to pop for six dedicated scopes, but nothing about the US$8mil or so that has already been allocated to the PanSTARRS project in Hawaii. UH is developing a telescope array and automated asteroid detection system to scan almost the entire sky every few days. Once deployed on either Mauna Kea or Haleakala, a five year campaign is planned to catalog at least 90% of the estimated number of 0.3km or bigger NEOs out there.
If an orbit is found that seems to intersect with us, then it becomes someone else's problem.
Luke, help me take this mask off