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.

Comments

This could be useful...

[Dr. Eggman]

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.

Armageddon wouldn't even be close.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Should have been done years ago

[MichaelSmith]

FromTFA:

The proposals are at an early stage, and a spacecraft needed just to send an astronaut that far into space exists only on the drawing board

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.