Slashdot Mirror
NASA Outlines Asteroid Deflection Program
An anonymous reader submitted a link to an International Herald Tribune story about NASA's answer to the movie 'Armageddon'. Specifically, they've outlined a plan to deflect a planet-killer asteroid. "In 1998, Congress gave NASA's Spaceguard Survey program a mandate of 'discovering, tracking, cataloging and characterizing' 90 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than one kilometer (3,200 feet) wide by 2008. An object that size would probably destroy civilization. The consensus at the conference was that the initial survey is doing fairly well although it will probably not quite meet the 2008 goal." With this tracking system in place, scientists are hopeful an intervention could be staged before any grim choices have to be made. Assuming they have the money and manpower needed for the effort, NASA has actually outlined a pair of procedures that dove-tail with each other: "First we would deflect the asteroid with kinetic impact from a missile (that is, running into it); then we would use the slight pull of a 'gravity tractor' -- a satellite that would hover near the asteroid -- to fine-tune its new trajectory to our liking. (In the case of an extremely large object, probably one in 100, the missile might have to contain a nuclear warhead.) To be effective, however, such missions would have to be launched 15 or even 30 years before a calculated impact."
I think in this day and age the requirement for accurate estimates are outweighed by the desire to put nuclear weapons in space.
You can imagine Peter Sellars in the War Room on the phone to China explaining that the nuclear deterrent is to deter asteroids, and in no way is trying to arm space.
How crazy do you have to be to think that an asteroid is a real threat for humankind? *shakes head*
Well, unless you've seen any dinosaurs lately, an extinction event has happened in the Earth's past at least once. Yeah, the chances of it happening again in our lifetime are infinitesimally small, but the consequences of *not* deflecting an asteroid if it comes our way are especially dire. I, for one, am all for the "just in case" planning in this regard.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
True, there are other, more pressing issues in the world, and so the asteroid thing should be on the back burner, but that does not mean that we should turn the back burner off. People can multi task, so lets do it.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
There are many other things (wars, diseases, maybe terrorism) which are much more likely to destroy civilization as we know it.
Considering how well money has been spent on projects like "the war to end all wars" and the "war on terrorism", I would say that a project to deflect asteroids looks very wise in comparison. Whereas, I agree, the research on diseases is an important and underfunded domain (yes, I'll consider it underfunded as long as I have a life expectancy inferior to two centuries). Anyway, it's "just" a few millions dollars spent on watching pebbles in the sky, an activity that could be useful and do no harm, and it goes back into the economy anyway...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
So now I don't know exactly what to think.
things in space don't change direction unless something else hits them
By hit you also mean the hit of gravity from a close encounter, right?
I come here for the love
>How crazy do you have to be to think that an asteroid is a real threat for humankind? *shakes head*
You have to be crazy enough to realize that civilization is more fragile than the species is, and crazy enough to realize that if an explosion the size of Tunguska or even smaller goes off near the India-Pakistan border the world will be breathing radioactive fallout for years.
You also have to be crazy enough to do basic math and work out the odds of intolerable damage on a time scale of hundreds or thousands of years. Doing correct math in front of people is widely considered evidence of craziness, to be sure.
My suspicion is that you would want to detonate the bomb some distance above the asteroid; the heat would cause the surface of the asteroid to vaporize, and the gas jetted from the surface would shove the asteroid off course.
Empty space varies as R-cubed, and the spherical effects tend to degrade as 1 over R-squared.
It doesn't take much of an R to make that asteroid look like a tiny, insignificant needle in the vast, overwhelming haystack of empty space.
Cf Derbyshire's critique of Whedon & the "nest of Reavers".