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NASA Making Plans To Save the Earth
aluminumangel writes, "Taking a page out of a Michael Bay movie, NASA is considering a manned mission to land on an asteroid, 'poke one with a stick,' and see how feasible it would be to deflect it from its course. Obviously, the application would be valuable in a doomsday situation and hopefully could keep us from going wherever the dinosaurs went." The article makes oblique reference to another goal such a mission could serve: giving us something to do in space, something to engage the paying public, between the time we return to the Moon and the time we get to Mars.
If this means finally launching Ben Affleck into space, I'm all for it.
I for one, welcome our new asteroid poking overlords.
In Soviet Russia, asteroid pokes you!
Only old people poke asteroids.
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
I already made the obligatory StarWars comment in the earlier topic about this one, but here it is again for all you Star Wars virgins out there...
First words on the assteroid:
"This is no cave !!"
whereby the best course of action was to let the asteroid hit us and destroy all humans....
I didn't realize it meant save the humans (for a short period of time) until they destroy themselves and everything with them.
They really need to hurry, Bruce Willis isn't getting any younger!
If we can good at altering asteroid's paths, we could use near earth asteroids as ramming tools. We should ram a few into the same spot on Mars and get a nice deep crater. We get practice diverting asteroids and learn more about deeper martain soil.
Demented But Determined.
I love how my post got Offtopic but the parent didn't.
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
Obligatory:
Man created beer.
God created pot.
I'm a fan of space and staying busy till the end times come, don't get me wrong, but what can poking a comet tell us that we wouldn't be able to figure out using the known laws of physics and, you know, science and stuff....
There are some who take responsibility for the world that they live in and others who just hope that everything will work out. Good on those in column a, for those in column b just do everyone a favour and don't get in the way. BTW I think it is worth mentioning that we are likely to kill each other long before an asteroid wipes us out but hey, better safe than sorry right?
...lots of big companies to get LOTS of money from NASA and the U.S. military for developing more and more technologies that won't actually be used at all in any flights to the moon or mars. I also expect to see either no flight to Mars, or one that falls far short of what is being planned today at best. At worst I expect to see quite a few lost lives within the first five to ten flights to/from Mars. Why? Because I expect that most of the money is going to be spent on developing PROFITABLE (here on Earth) technologies that will only have a very loose connection to the missions. This is just a huge money grab and not about the advancement of science or discovery.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Then you will get what you deserve.
...from the original
Good addendum to the article here. While they have very similar titles, they offer vastly different reasons for this landing. Justification for each other? Maybe just a good way to kill two birds with one stone.
A practice quiz saving the world might serve us better if there ever is a final exam.
You're either a 1 or a 0. Alive or Dead.
As an exercise for my high-school physics students studying energy and momentum conservation, I had them run the numbers on the scenario from the movie "Armageddon" for an asteroid "the size of Texas", taking this to mean in separate cases the area of Texas with a range of densities, etc.
Giving the astronauts every benefit of the doubt (able to intercept it twice as far out as they did in the movie, bomb able to be placed at the center of mass, the bomb having ten times the yield of largest nuke ever exploded by man, perfectly elastic explosion, etc. etc. etc.) they not only couldn't make the asteroid miss the Earth, they would only have changed impact points by about a meter!
I love sci-fi movies and like to give my students problems from popular films that illustrate the absurdity of Hollywood stories.
hopefully could keep us from going wherever the dinosaurs went.
Wherever the dinosaurs went, you'll eventually go at some point in your life. I don't think a person setting foot on some random rock will change that.
If you can divert it, you can steer it. If you can steer it you can target an area on the planet.
Take out a major city, no radiation. Just the threat would be a useful tool of terror and control.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If ever a story deserved an "itsatrap" tag, this story is one of them. Who can say what the result would be? It could have unintended consequences.
I hope they pick a small asteroid to test on.
Moving an asteroid means landing an engine on the thing and firing it. That doesn't require people. If you send people, you have to send all that extra mass for life support, a return vehicle, and return fuel. Which cuts into the fuel for moving the asteroid. So sending people is a lose.
Let this rock disintegrate into nothing. I'm convinced nothing good can come of this human experiment. Whoever or whatever set this up has failed, or maybe they've been proven right. Nevermind, it would be better if humans destroyed this god forsaken shithole and let the surviving crockroaches and worms start another era of magnificent evolution.
Hey, there's some good stuff in Redmond.
(Mods, click link before modding Troll.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
phew, I feel safer knowing that Michael Bay's movies are the blueprint for saving the world. At least I can rest easy tonight.
FromTFA:
Actually the apollo stack (SM, CM, LM ascent and descent stages) had easily enough velocity budget to fly to and return from some near Earth asteroids. It didn't have the consumables to do it but that could have been launched separately. You get more redundancy that way.
Of course we don't have the apollo CM, which is the only spacecraft in existance which could make a high speed return from an asteroid and reenter the atmosphere, but we will have the CRV which should have similar capabilities. The saturn 5 launch system doesn't exist either and thats the part of this system which is really vapourware.
Anyway good luck to them. Mars has been held off for so long because it is so much more risky and difficult than the moon. Asteroids offer progressively harder challenges, minus the risk of sudden death landing a heavy vehicle on mars.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That's what I say about Homeland security. It's the same thing-just a differnt scale. The lack of faith has realtivity. The best one yet: In God we trust on all that smelly, stinky green crap we need to get these projects done. I don't think God will let that equation work.
Now all we need is an asteroid for them to save us from.
Slashdot is powered by your submission.
A couple of cleansing asteroids actually would not hurt getting rid of those little pests walking upright and haven't learned yet how to use their enlarged brains:
Subject: Holy Hell They've Gone Nuts - $160 billion More for Iraq!
http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=2171&
Fiscal 2007 War Supplemental Expected to Be Largest Yet:
Pentagon Prepares $160 Billion Request for Iraq War
11/12/2006
CQ TODAY
Nov. 7, 2006
On the one hand, they already married earlier this week. On the other hand, this story is a dupe from earlier this week so it all evens out.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
That must be an awfully long stick.
... and then they built the supercollider.
cheap karma
Karma is only important to you because you don't have any.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Technically, the dinosaurs didn't go anywhere. They just shrunk and grew feathers.. we know grow them in factory farms and eat them by the pound at Chik-Fil-A.
(That and worship our them as our yellow masters through PBS.)
-GiH
If they're going to take inspiration from Michael Bay films, they need to attempt to build life size TransFormers.
Leaving aside the horrible acting in Armaggedon, the portrayal of reality in that movie is atrocious! There are different levels of science fiction, requiring differing levels of suspended disbelief. It runs the gamut from Star Wars, where things like hyperdrive and lightsabers are somehow possible, to Star Trek, some of which could be possible in the 24th century, to 2001, which definitely could have taken place in 2001. This movie seems to exist somewhere inbetween - it wants to come off as being possible today, and yet requires a complete disposal of all scientific knowledge.
In college I took a course on science and communication - how we try, and often fail, to explain science and technology to the public. One homework assignment was to watch the movie Armaggedeon and describe the ways they get it wrong. The "it" here includes:
* physics (it actually takes days to go from earth to the moon - even then it took the Saturn V rocket to get the relatively small Apollo LM/CSM craft that far. Oh, and the old favorite, that there's lots of things to hear in space.),
* propulsion technology (the notion that a space station has a propulsion system capable of generating 1 g of continuous acceleration, or that the shuttle's engines can produce several g's of acceleration all on their own),
* engineering (that you could build a space station that wouldn't collapse under 1 g of acceleration),
* medicine (that space dementia is a likely condition, resulting in careless manslaughter behavior),
* probability (that out of the total surface of the earth, the only places that get struck are NYC, Paris, and Hong Kong (?)),
* astronomy (that, up close, asteroids seem to be made of very brittle stalagmites of rock, and spew radioactive-looking gas).
Science in general. This was a film seen by millions of people - it is probably the first thing most people think about when the subject of asteroids comes up. It's well for Carl Sagan that he was already deceased - the notion that such a movie existed would have killed him. Armaggedon's contemporary, Deep Impact, was more plausible and realistic, if you can get past Elija Wood being a teenager. Alas, it tanked.
I gave up after filling 10 pages with the first hour of the movie - it was too painful to continue.
Hey you will go screwing up all those astrologists and their predictions if you start moving crap around! Think of the ASTROLOGISTS!!!!!
I for one welcome the uprising against the new asteroid overlords.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"And in other news a freak accident has sent an asteroid involved in a mock doomsday mission hurdling towards Earth. How will this affect your weekend? Stay tuned for Tom and his weekend weather forecast."
Deflecting something from a particular course is likley a lot easier than setting it on to a specific new course. All you need is a big enough push (or bigger) to ensure it missing hitting (for example) Earth. Now to have it hit a particular target, you would need much more exact placing and timing of an explosion/rocket/etc.
Asteroids move fast enough that by the time anyone noticed a tiny rock flying on a direct course for Earth, it would be much too late to do anything about it, and it would more than likely go unnoticed until our atmosphere is already an ashy mess. The most we could do is fire a couple of nukes at it and hope for the best. This money should be spent finding ways to colonize other planets in my opinion.
Let's see. There was an air blast in Siberia that people hypothesize was a meteorite. There was a large meteor strike 35Million years ago, and one about 65 million years ago. Better spend $Billions$ to fight this threat. Who cares if there is an actual threat, better look to Bruce Willis movies to figure out how to get public support for the expensive beaurocratic solutions, and develop a solution now that is 100 times more expensive than it would be 100 years from now (i.e., let's find a reason for existance).
The only threat here seems to be that NASA is an agency in trouble. Forbidding launches of private spacecraft in the US to protect the shuttle merely helped other countries to develop their own space programs. We are all tired of expensive failure after failure of overly complex missions, and see the many near misses of massive failures such as Hubble with its inverted lens, and Galileo when the antenna wouldn't open. [Being honest people we love the two Mars rovers, and applaud the out of the box thinking in their lander].
NASA, figure out a mission, or get out of the way.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
My crude reverse-engineering of the asteroid suggests that it would have to have been moving very very slowly compared to the Earth, and be about 50 miles across. Even so, the calculator predicted that anything within the horizon of such an impact would be instantly vaporized and that the entire hemisphere would be subject to earth tremors of magnitude 11.2 or above. That was about the smallest-scale devastation I could find that would produce the right-sized crater.
(Faster asteroids would be smaller, for the same-sized crater, but end up releasing much more energy, as energy goes up with the square of the velocity.)
Now, turning an asteroid (or comet) is plausible, but it has to be done early. You say you can only achieve a meter or so, but in reality that doesn't mean anything. You change the trajectory, and the change of displacement is then the distance the asteroid travels divided by the tangent of the angle between the original path and the new path. (The tangent is equal to the opposite over the adjacent - SOH CAH TOA. You make the adjacent the line it would originally have followed and the opposite becomes the displacement.) Objects travelling along a curved trajectory need to be mapped into a linear system first, which is usually a very simple transform.
So how does this help? Well, since you are changing an angle, the implication is that if you increase the distance away you make this change, you will increase the displacement from the original position. If the change in displacement exceeds the Earth's radius plus the safety margin needed to prevent the Earth's gravity from causing the collision to occur anyway, then it makes bugger all difference if you can make one degree of change or one billionth of a second of a degree. All that matters is that the cumulative change places the body outside the danger zone.
What does this mean in practice? In practice, it means that if it's just about to collide, there is nothing you can do to stop it and there are few structures in the world capable of withstanding 11.2 magnitude tremors. Evacuating the hemisphere and placing everyone on a geologically-sound plateau would be far cheaper and would have a much better chance of success. Near-zero, as opposed to absolutely zero.
If the body is unlikely to collide for a couple of orbits and a few hundred years, then you can talk about serious landscaping the solar system. That's the kind of distance where even a small angle will make a large difference. Better yet, gravity is vastly more powerful than any explosion - if you can shift the orbit just enough to place the body close to a large planet, the total deflection will vastly exceed anything explosives can achieve. Gravity is a significant force on these scales.
This all assumes that the body is solid, of course. The Japanese robot probe that landed on an asteroid not too long ago found a nearby asteroid whose density was unimaginably low - it is likely to be nothing more than space grit held together with collective gravitational attraction where the packing is no better - and probably worse - than coarse-grain sand. It could be said that its structure is best described as sheer damn luck. You fire off a nuke on something like that and there's no telling what will happen, other than most of the energy will go straight through it. At this point, we simply don't have anything like a large enough catalog of asteroids, nor in anything like sufficient detail, to know if this is a freak accident or the norm. Until you know enough of the basics, you can't know anything about the complexities.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm sorry, that has to be the dumbest movie plot scenario I have ever heard. Honestly the idea of weaponizing asteroids is so stupid and so inefficient and so unneccassary I probably won't be able to read slashdot for a week now. My god.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious: Using an asteroid landing as a precusror to a mining mission.
If NASA's plans go forward, they're going to need a space infrastructure. Eventually, that will mean space-based manufacturing. For manufacturing, you need raw materials. Those raw materials are expensive to lift from Earth's gravity well. Ergo, the best solution is to mine them from much smaller gravity wells where the cost of transport is comparitively minimal.
The key issue that an mission to an asteroid would need to resolve is the actual composition and concentration of valuable ores. Scientists currently have a lot of educated guesses, but we won't know for sure until a geologist makes a proper survey.
When said asteroid is altered TOO much, and we end up sending a large pile of rock plummeting towards us anyways? Perhaps faster than we can do anything about it?
It's not so bad. You can be a fossil fuel 35 million years from now when the apes rule the Earth!
2. We are NOT going to go to Mars.
3. We are NOT going to send PEOPLE to a fucking asteroid.
Why?
It's all very simple: money, energy, and need.
1. The only thing on the moon that's worth a flying fuck is He3. However, even with all the possibilities of enormous electricity provided from He3 reactors here on terra firma, building and decommissioning the reactors, AND mining the crap out of the moon's regolith will pretty much blow it's ER/EI ratio to pieces. Also, putting people on the moon is foolish - it's extremely radioactive up there. So, you'll need to send robots. you will also need to send HUGE self-repairing mining machines up there, so they can chew up the regolith. We can't get the political will to fix the freakin' Hubble, and someone wants to send enormous mining machines to chew up the He3 so some fat ass retard can sit and watch American Idol on his 53 inch plasma? I don't think so...
2. Mars is not going to happen - too far, too dangerous. We'll continue to send little probes and stuff, but that's about it. Terraforming? No way. We can't muster the brains and skills to build a rockin OS and you want to terraform a planet? We. don't. think. so.
3. We will send probes to asteroids. IT is much more efficient. If one is coming at us, we will sned probes to deal with it, not some space cowboy.
Sorry to pop some dreams, but thems' the facts.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Reading the subject I thought they were going to clean up the environment.. Well, so long as we don't get hit with any asteroids everything is fine.
Most went into the oil business, and the rest became COBOL programmers.
Live at least another 60 years, till I'm 100, and then wait for Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susanne will to be considered "the masters."
So, you're OK with the potential of some crazed military lunatic "accidentally" divert an asteroid our way? Because, if I read the signs correctly, Iraq is pretty much over and we need a new worry and the US can't pull a stunt like that again without losing the last bit of global support they had.
Time for an 'accident' and 'hero' approach - the problem being that the US appears to believe its own Hollywood movies.
This guy just copied my post from a few days ago! (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20689 8&cid=16870614) and posted it as his (or her) own. Whoever you are, please give proper attribution! And while you're at it you should include all of my post including my link to a previous post! http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171538&cid=142 87818
- Wisebabo
I don't know how the space got into my link from my previous post. Please use this link. http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=206898 &cid=16870614
NASA plans _everything_. Wake me up when they actually does something like this.
An asteroid named Apophis? A scientist named Dr. McKay? Mere coincidence? I think not!
I originally came up with this idea thinking that robots should carry it out but it could also be performed by a manned mission.
Novel method for changing orbit of small planetary body (asteroid/comet).
Abstract: Using a tethered "sling" to release pieces of a small planetary body, a small (inexpensive) payload delivered to a body rotating at a sufficient rate can effectively convert the body's rotational energy into directed kinetic energy. The tether, which may be attached to said body via cables or netting, can also generate power for its own operations, obviating a need for a large power source. Since only a small fraction of the mass is to released at any one time, problems such as excessive accelration, breakup of body etc. will be avoided. In addition to changing the velocity of the asteroid/comet (for diversion from earth impact or placing the asteroid into a more accessible orbit for mining), the ejected material may be useful on its own as mined material or even as a space based weapon system (hurling relatively massive hunks of rock at satellites will be quite effective).
Main text: Previous proposals for changing the orbital path of a small planetary body have included delivering an explosive charge to said body (typically nuclear) for impact on or near it, moving the body directly through the use of ion drives or mass accelerators or even gravitional attraction by a sufficiently large spacecraft, changing the albedo of the body (or increasing/decreasing the amount of light/solar wind) or even utilizing the outgassing of volatiles on suitable bodies (like comets) by placing it inside a giant "bag" with a directed opening. These ideas unfortantely suffer from various problems such as possibility of fracturing said body or high costs due to large spacecraft or energy sources being sent over interplanetary distances. Still the consequences of a major impact or dire enough so to warrant the consideration of these ideas.
My idea, which I am releasing into the public domain, would be to convert the rotational energy of the small planetary body into directed kinetic energy sufficient to "push" the body on a different orbital path. If done early enough (years? decades?) this small diversion could prevent the body from impacting the earth. The advantage to using my scheme would be that the spacecraft sent to the object could be reasonably small although it would require a mechanism for securely attaching a long (kilometers?) tether to the asteroid via cables or, in the case of a very fragmented body, perhaps a large net. The cable would be conducting and may even be self extending using static charges or pressurized gas. Small robots would be used for both moving material up and down the cable as well as mining the body for material to be cast into space.
The main design consideration would be the length of the tether (or possibly tower), it must extend beyond the "geo"-sync distance defined by the rotational speed of the body and its gravitational attraction. For some objects no doubt this would require a tether to be impractically long, however recent probes have determined that many(?) bodies rotate fast enough for a tether to be of practical length. ("Practical length" is in reference to NASA experiments in LEO where tethers were extended or attempted to be extended distance of up to tens of kilometers). (Another major impediment would be if the body were tumbling, possibly in a chaotic fashion. I do not know if a tether/tower could be constructed in that scenario). The tether would have a few other important characteristics. It should allow for small robots to travel up and down its length by means of a gripping mechanism (preferably simultaneously on two "sides") and should be conducting. This would allow for the robots to both receive power for their "climb" and to generate power once they've passed the "geo"-sync height. The tether would be kept taught by means of a counterweight placed beyond the "geo"-sync height, presumably at the end of the tether.
The implementat
I wish we would send out robots/nukes/humans to create billions of dust and rock sized particles out of the asteroids, for a great display.. Imagine the sky full of shooting stars streaking from a single point in the sky, wow ! Now, attach a few elements to the dust and there will be colors. All you need is a shovel up there, and precise knowledge of the mechanics of space.
Nasa Making Plans To Serve The Earth!
"The bad machine doesn't know he's a bad machine."
Yeah, right. And heavier-than-air flying machines won't work, and if they did, they'd be much too expensive and dangerous for anyone.
You're dead on when considering the current state and economics of technology -- going to the Moon may be (and going Mars is certainly) too expensive for a sustained effort. Right now. However, with the parallel progress in any number of fields, such as materials science, computer aided design and simulation, energy related technologies (let's get some really efficient nukes into space!), what was impossible 80 years ago became possible as stunts for major governments 50 years ago, commercial propositions 25 years ago, and the playground of billionaires and even mere dirt-poor multi-millionaires today. If we were to dump our technical know-how back in time onto the Victorians, they still wouldn't have been able to afford building and operating commercial airplanes -- they just weren't rich enough for the infrastructure. That took a number of decades to roll out.
However, while I think you're wrong in specifics, I agree that automated solutions (despite all the shortcomings of IT) will be cost effective much sooner than all the infrastructure necessary to support huge protoplasmic bags of water and impurities such as yours truly. But nature abhors a vacuum (and we kinda like it!) -- where it's possible to go, someone will, eventually, if only through Brownian motion!
The asteroids and humans has lived peacefully together for millions of years. And now we're coming up there to poke them with a stick! I say that's just asking for trouble. Blame NASA for the next mass extinction event!
NASA is "really neat", heck we're talking astronauts...however, it is a massive goverment program that must fight for the hearts and minds (and tax dollars) of the american public, and the congress, particularly after the shuttle disasters made folks wonder if the risk/benefit of manned space flight was worth $20,000,000,000.00 a year.
So, NASA even while NASA is trying to diversify, and get retire the shuttle, it still has lots of vested interests that want manned space flight to continue. So, it has to come up with something it can market and sell to the Congress and ultimately the public.
NASA has distributed it's sites throughout the U.S., so as to maximize congressional support for "the home town boys", and now appears to be following the Zeitgeist, to determine what its next "mission" should be. The general public doesn't really understand Hubble telescope looking at Dark Matter (heck, nobody understands dark matter), so that doesn't sell well...but Doomsday scenarios!! Hey, everyone gets that! Global warming?? Heck, lets turn those telescopes around and look at the earth with them..that's understandable!!
Yep, this is called marketing, it's just that simple..
As much as people may criticize this, I have to say it's the most useful thing we could possibly do with space technology. I can't think of any better investment the NASA or the ESA could make than safeguarding our future. Going to Mars is, in my opinion, a huge waste of money. But deflecting asteroids that could take out a city, or worse, is worth trillions of dollars in investment - no exaggeration.
The whole "burn up in the atmosphere" angle is also not good because if you take the kinetic energy of the asteroid and deposit it in the atmosphere INSTEAD of cratering on the earth, then you find the atmosphere heats up to thousands of degrees over thousands of square miles and everything underneath it essentially broils like in your oven.
TDz.
Bowling balls
:D
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
I say capture the bastards and put 'em in Earth's Trojan Points! Need water? Capture a comet (uh, better bag that first. Paper or plastic, what a question...). Need iron? Plenty of it floating around. Need raw material for a space station? Hollow out a rocky asteroid.
What we have is not a failure of technology. What we have is a failure of imagination. *sigh*
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
What would suck is if the resulting explosion actually did set the rock on a collision course with earth!
I prefer the Revolutionary War. Trust God and then do your part. Have we lost this? The Declaration of Independence says rights come from God. The UN charter says rights come from man. But that means rights can be taken away from man. In reality only the freedom the exercise those rights can be taken away by man.
Nothing we have any science to support suggests that the Earth is facing danger within the next million years. The people on it, however, could be in danger from such things. The Earth itself, however, is not sentient and thus does not care. We are just the latest dominant species to make a mess of the place and for all that the mess is remarkably large, we are a small and recent footnote overall. This fairly short period of what we consider reasonable weather won't last any more than any other narrow range of climate has lasted. Meteors will come, solar flares will come, things will change. Earth will still be here.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Can saving the world wait until they save the got-damn cheerleader first? It's been like five episodes already and I'm sick of that catch phrase!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
this is complete bullcrap
asteroids are MUCH less threatening to us, than FUD spreading politicians and sensation-hungry media tell us, since the earth itself is moving and its moving FAST. Since we monitor asteroids, we can pretty early predict when and where one of them might hit us.
IF an asteroid was ever really threatening to us, we'd just launch a rocket early enough to slow it down just a little so it arrives the collision point a little later and the (fast moving) earth is out of the line of fire
there is simply no necessity to get someone on such an asteroid like in the movie armageddon...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
...hopefully could keep us from going wherever the dinosaurs went. They didn't go anywhere. They just died.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1950258 ,00.html
"At Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in California, scientists monitor all "potentially hazardous asteroids" that might one day end up on a collision course with Earth. So far they number 831. The next close-ish shave - at a mere 17 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth - will be asteroid 2004QD14 on November 29."
Oakay
in other news the Boeing company has vectored a near earth iron rich rock to a Lagrange point between the earth and moon...
breaking news... the Boeing co. has announced there was a misfire in one of the attitude jets and the large iron rock is on a new trajectory
breaking news update...the space command has launched nuke missiles at the fast approaching large iron rock
breaking news update update...millions and millions of small radioactive iron rocks expected to shower the earth tomorrow in spectacular meteor shower
breaking news...huge glowing ball seen from international space station...
Changing an asteroid's path is just a technological achievement.
The purpose of changing an asteroid's path is a political decision.
The 'Save the Earth' Technology also becomes one hell of a weapons platform when put into the hands of the military. Cheaper than a nuke and more powerful too, with no radioactive residue.
Spaced based weapons scaling from city sized attacks up to planet killers. Ouch.
Problem overseas? Drop a big rock on the capital of a country, or its major industrial city, or its highest density population center.
Tunguska Destroyed Forest
Make it look like a 'natural event' and hide your countries true political motives...
To assume that technology could be used only for the good of the people is naive, at best.
I thought Apophis was destroyed already by robots.
If Apophis is a threat, send SG-1
Truth hurts, doesn't it?
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
For surely if this can save the earth, it can also destroy parts/all of it.
But now I actually have to see this movie. Something that bad has to be good, or something like that.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Ok, since there's so many references on here to the Stargate TV seriesis (what do you mean that's not a real word?)...
Let's say a large asteroid (whatever would be big enough to cause catastrophic damage to Earth's population) was on it's way. And further, let's say we don't have the firepower and/or the time to attempt to divert it. However, we happened to have a stargate unit and there existed the technology to build a really, really large-diametered version of it and send it up there, placing it just ahead of the asteroid, activate it, and then nudge it ahead until it swallowed the asteroid.
Ok, my question: Would it be ethical to do that; and would our world society decide to do that, even if it might mean causing that asteroid to strike another (possibly inhabited) world? I'm not looking for some overly-simplistic "Why *no*, of course not! That would be horrible!" answer posted here. I'm curious to see what everyone elses' take on the various countries-of-the-world's attitude would be.
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Doesn't this seem odd to anyone else??? I mean I haven't read into the situation at all but if this is something to hold us over until we go to the moon wouldn't it imply that the asteriod might be closer than the moon?? If it's something that we can land a ship on and it's closer than the moon... I don't know if I want to wait in line for my Wii or go stock up on SPAM. Either way I personally liked Deep impact better than Armegeddon...
But, you must acknowledge that because the Saturn V has been built, did fly to the Moon and back, that it is certainly within reach technologically by early 21st Century tools and industrial practicies. Half the battle with developing a technology is proving that it can even be done at all, which building a moon rocket is not a problem.
Instead, it becomes "can we do it better than Von Braun". Or cheaper.
Some things we do know we can do much better than the Von Braun engineering team of the 1950's (when he started) is that metalurgical sciences have progress significantly since then with much improved alloys for much lighter spacecraft, and that the guidance electronics have also improved by many orders of magnitude. The entire Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) can be built on a single chip, for instance. An FPGA for that matter, and room to spare. Minaturization efforts as well as low-power embedded systems have also made a huge improvement for what is possible for manned spaceflight today. For crying out loud, the Mercury capsule used vacuum tubes for some of its components. I know we can do much better in terms of reliability and weight reduction today.
All this means that building a Saturn V today can be done both cheaper (inflation adjusted) and much more reliable than could ever be considered in the 1960's.
Same old, same old, just now they are injection antiprotons in to speed things up and get a more complete reaction. Of it that proves too much of a technical risk to send up, just do a regular old bomb. -bix