ESA Selects Targets for Asteroid Deflection Test

Vandil X writes "The European Space Agency has announced that it has selected two candidate asteroid targets for a planned mission to impact an asteroid in an attempt to deflect the asteroid off course by a measurable amount. The mission, dubbed "Don Quijote," will send two spacecraft to their final choice asteroid. One craft will impact the asteroid while the other will observe the asteroid before and after the collision. The mission craft and target selection are expected to be finalized sometime in 2007."

Comments

Re:Something wrong with p? SIMPLE

[amdotaku]

(p1 + p2)[)[initial]=(p1 + p2)[final]

Uh, we know the first two p(momentum, vector) values(and that's if we know the mass of the asteroid, which isn't necessarily true), but not the second two. In my math classes, we learned that was 1 equation (vector valued) and two unknown vectors. I don't think anyone can solve that, and no, conservation of kinetic energy won't work because the internal energy changes big time in most non-particle scale collisions. In Mechanics, many of our college educated comrades learned of a way to resolve this textbook documented issue with the simple aide of a constant e, which details the elasticity of the interaction. Unfortunately, e is not easy to determine through theory, and is also just a model (and a bad one at that), and therefore an experiment is usually called for (and usually a lot of them). 'Nuff said.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Collision. html