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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."
I hope Bruce Willis in onboard.
:wq
Can't we just drill 20 miles into it and blow the fucker up with a nuke?
Is this simply a kamikazee run? I did not read anything to make me think otherwise. I seriously question the science of this... being able to calculate the change in direction should only be complicate by not knowing the exact mass of the asteroid.
I would think something like white paint (using the reflective properties to move the asteroid) would be more interesting. Slower, for sure, but much more effective over a period of months or years.
Is there something to this mission that I am missing?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...if they blow it off course in the wrong direction?
I'll go if Liv Tyler is waiting upon my return (although when I get back she will be a bit old).
FTA: On 19 December 2004 MN4, an asteroid of about 400 m, lost since its discovery six months earlier, was observed again and its orbit was computed. It immediately became clear that the chances that it could hit the Earth during a close encounter in 2029 were unusually high. As the days passed the probability did not decrease and the asteroid became notorious for surpassing all previous records in the Torino and Palermo impact risk scales - scales that measure the risk of an asteroid impact just as the Richter scale quantifies the size of an earthquake.
It is funny what we never think of- every night while we sleep there are so many people keeping us safe- Call me a geek, but astronomers are unsung heroes. I am glad someone is worried about destruction of the Earth...
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
... but can only watch it in black and white vector graphics, and have to pay $0.25 to view it.
...are located here. Looks kind of odd.
In other news, the asteroid deflected in 2008 by the European Space Agency has been confirmed as hitting Earth in December this year, with an expected impact point near Switzerland.
It's been nice knowing you folks.
my horoscope... this could immeasurably ruin my life!! Don't these insensitive rock-et science clods know they could end up making it so I never meet a woman?
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What's wrong with the good old p=mv (momentum)?
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
-- Yogi Berra
TTFN
Surely they should have chosen a name that implied success rather than invoke the name of a hopeless romantic who is known for fighting the inevitable.
And they could have spelled it correctly: Don Quixote.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
The two target candidates are:
1. 2002 AT4
2. France
Yeah, unfortunately there is something wrong with that equation. It does not take into account of the direction of which the asteroid will be deflected. Although I hope that the mathematics used to base the "crash" on would be calculated so that it does not shift the objects into a collision course with Earth. Knowing us, some organization will use British units, one will use Metric.
I think they want to determine how much p of the impactor is needed to change the v of a rock. You see, the important thing is whether the micro-asteroid will stay together or not. Delta p is known in advance, of course!
... to that crazy Russian lady who claims that stuff like this will mess up her horoscope?
I haven't RTFA, but I expect that they aren't looking to challenge the laws of physics as much as test their engineering skills. It's pretty hard to hit something that far away and going that fast, especially if you want to hit it a particular way. They are probably testing to see if they can hit it just the way they want to so that they can actually make use of p=mv.
...Wouldn't the cost of such a test be well into millions of dollars? That sounds expensive for something that is just a test... But I could be wrong.
Also, never has the quote at the bottom of the screen been so appropriate.
Oh, wow! Look at the moon!
What we don't want to hear after a successful deflection....
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Brace for another lawsuit from that kooky Russian astrologer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If you're interested in asteroid deflection, Jay Melosh has a few ideas.
Including: "Deploying a giant parabolic mirror to concentrate the sun's rays and vaporize rock on the surface of the asteroid. The vaporized material flies off at high speed and generates a re-coil action that pushes the asteroid, slowly but surely, in the opposite direction."
Which is great, because the parabolic mirror can double as a way for Bruce Willis to cook and refrigerate his food while he's there.
Great! No really, we need to test out the ability to do this so when we need to do this we can. I hear China also has a planned mission very similar to this. They intent do attempt to change the course of a comet. And we've already demonstrated that we could do such a thing, with Deep Impact (what prompted the Chinese, and likely the ESA as well). True, we didn't change it's course, but if the "object" has been a nuke instead...
If it were to impact a landmass, we could consider ourselves lucky. Given the high proportion of water to land on the planet, the odds are overwhelmingly against a land impact. Sure, it happens. Sure, it would suck. A land impact would undoubtedly render complete destruction over a large area, alter local climate, cause all fault-lines to shatter, and reduce the affected area to glowing slag. However, that IS the good news. Now the bad news: Models of an ocean impact suggest the global climate would be upset for decades - if not longer. It would impose near ice-age conditions due to solar energy reflected by the planet-wide clouds caused by the vaporization of several trillion tons of seawater. Muddy, salty rain would destroy the world's breadbaskets. Sunlight might not reach the surface for tens of years.
..The implications are enormous, and need not be enumerated; surely the point is made.
Actions such as these aimed at researching the feasibility of deflection should be supported, not something due scorn. The odds of such a cataclysm occurring in our lifetime are indeed negligible...but surely, being prepared is better than being caught with our pants down.
Alarmist? Maybe; the course of history will judge.
**wax on** It's not an F. What you see is the "long s". It's how they used to draw an S character since the days of Carolingian Minuscule, from which hand our "Times Roman" eventually derived. You'll note there was no crossbar on the letter in that form - the crossbar distinguished the "f" from the "long s". The form we take as "s" appeared only at the end of the word. Thus, "Congrefs" would have been pronounced "Congress". **wax off**
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
the ESA for showing forethought in a time of chaos. This is the kind of productive stuff that needs to happen.
We waste so much money on boondoggles (won't even go into that) but so little effort now goes into research into the human condition. We are a smart group, us humans, when we really HAVE to be. Why not try to make it a little more often, just for flip sake, eh?
(p1 + p2)[)[initial]=(p1 + p2)[final]
. html
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
Someone brought up the Pioneer anomaly over in the Voyager thread earlier today. Intesting stuff, proves Yogi knows what he's talking about.
#include <signature.h>
This sounds a lot like something that's been tried before. Why don't they draw a conclusion from the existing data from Tempel-1? Or, while they're at it, why not try a new concept?
For instance, how about landing on the asteroid and attaching an anchor to it? Drop anchor (unreel) and wait for the closest approach to the moon. Then, use an ion drive on the anchor to bring it as close to the moon as possible. If the cable is long enough, the anchor will be pulled down into the gravity well of the moon with much greater force than otherwise. It won't capture the asteroid in lunar orbit, but the trajectory of the asteroid will be changed in a far more predictable and adjustable way than with impacts and explosions.
An extra bonus is that communicating with the anchor, you will always know the exact location of the asteroid.
The only catch is that you need a very long cable, and that will raise the launch costs.
If you think about this even semi rationally, look at the data from the Deep Impact mission. The trajectory of the rock prior to impact was quite well known, well enough, an intercept course could be plotted and executed. Does anybody think that nobody at nasa thought to measure trajectory AFTER the impact, and possibly calculate trajectory changes of the target rock? This is a mission that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and that's extremely valuable information, available for the taking after the impact. I'm quite sure that while the primary investigators on Deep Impact are all wrapped up in analyzing ejecta data, there are secondary investigators measuring and calculating trajectory changes.
The proposed ESA mission is basically Deep Impact Version 2.0, a more refined variant than version 1. Version 1 (executed by Nasa) intended to hit the target rock, and studying ejecta was labelled as the 'primary' objective. In Version 2, the objective is to hit the target rock much more precisely, relabel the 'primary data' as that of the trajectory change, and re-label the ejecta data as 'secondary'. The end result is, a mission plan that hits more political hot buttons (reference the data collection re-labelling), its easier to get grants for impactor related investigation today.
The reality is, this mission is a logical follow on which builds on the success of Deep Impact. The re-labelling of primary mission goals is just an artifact of the political process required to procure funding, the 'grants game'. The data regarding target object composition will still be collected in various forms, and it'll still get analyzed, just as trajectory data is still being collected and analyzed from the Deep Impact mission.
I'm starting to get worried here. Most of the space programs in the world are trying to hit asteroids, perhaps deflect them. Even the military is now looking at anti-satellite weapons. So I'm beginning to wonder, what's with this sudden surge of interest in defense against things hitting us from space? Do they know something (troubling) that I don't?
Good old linear momentum conservation is insufficient information to specify the outcome. Throw in energy balance (assuming you account for all losses of kinetic energy properly) and you have enough information for 1D collisions only - still not enough equations to determine angles; now moving to 'real life' you have to add angular momentum conservation to the mix, too. To completely specify the answer you need details about geometry (mass center, impact point) and surface (orientation, hardness and so on) This already moves the question quite a bit into engineering - and requires data on asteroids. I assume gathering such data is closer to the purpose of this experiment.
i wonder what effect this will have on my horoscope ;)
That's it.
You're all cut off.
No more! No more I say!
How many "what if they knock it on course to hit Earth" lines does a person have to read around here.
For the sake of sanity, STOP!
Vlachen of Aranias
Freelance Slacker
Jack of All Trades
We will deflect an Asteroid. Within a few 1000 years it will hit another world. The few aliens that 'went underground' will figure out why that happend and they will launch an attact om earth...
There's a Beagle 2 joke here somewhere, but I can't place it.
...who live in the asteroid? I wonder if they have the technology to build a rocket to deflect the two metal asteroids in crash-route with them.
What, do I need a sig now?