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Nukes Against Earth-Impacting Asteroids
TopSpin writes "Flight International reports that scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have developed designs for an array of asteroid interceptors wielding 1.2-megaton B83 nuclear warheads. The hypothetical mission for these designs is based on an Apophis-sized Earth impactor 2 to 5 years out. According to NASA, 'Nuclear standoff explosions are assessed to be 10-100 times more effective [at deflection] than the non-nuclear alternatives analyzed in this study." On April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass closer to earth than geosynchronous satellites orbit.
extinction-level-event nuke-shielded overlords!
-WtC
*please insert sig*
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
and kill everyone with atmospheric radiations?
Live Electronic Music
If it's not going to hit Earth, will Skynet or the terminators even care?
Is that a Friday?
with an alternate reality gateway, and a crack commando team consisting of a linguist with allergies, a wise cracking Colonel, a brilliant astrophysicist, and someone with a horrible gastronomical infection. Also some grenades.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
In case you were wondering, Apophis is the Greek form of the name for the Egyptian Demon Apep.
Otherwise known as the personification of all that is evil.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Would an explosion in space would function in the same manner?
Wait for it....
Get Ben Affleck's spacesuit ready.
Apophis was lowered to 0 on the Torino scale sometime last fall. I'm not sure why it even warranted a mention in this particular context..
We don't need nukes! We need some Wil Wheaton to reprise his role as Star Trek TNG's Wesley Crusher, then "...come off the main lead, split off at the force activator, then reversing power leads through the force activator, repulsor beam powers against Tsilokovsky..." err...the asteroid. At this point, everyone will remember that this idea sucked and we'll use that sucking power to pull the asteroid into the sun.
Billions saved and problem solved. All we need now is some sort of "suck converter"! Get on it NASA!
exploding nuclear weapons from a distance only works if the asteroid is fairly solid, like the metallic [M-type] asteroids. The more porous asteroids [there seem to be many] don't seem to respond as well to such explosions. As for the Armageddon-type way of dealing with asteroids, you just made a single asteroid into a hail of dangerous shrapnel. Although if we exploded a nuclear charge [a smaller one] that only tosses up a part of the asteroid and direct the shrapnel away from Eath, the shrapnel would go in one direction [wherever your plan dictates] and the asteroid generally goes in the opposing direction, knocking it off course. over a period of several years even a small orbital change will result in Earth being safe for now. [hopefully we have that much time if not start sipping your favorite alcoholic beverage :) ]
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
So we're not supposed to put weapons in space and point them at Earth, but we can stick them up and point them at asteroids... I suppose if we ever need them here we can always just turn them around
Couldn't we simply send a small spacecraft to intercept the asteroid? Say, a small craft, probably with one primary weapon that has plenty of ammo... probably shaped like a triangle, I think. It could use this "weapon" to then shoot at any incoming asteroids.
Of course, the weapon wouldn't be as powerful as a nuke, and would probably split the asteroid in, say, half. The ship would then have to shoot both halves, breaking them again into half, creating four asteroids where just one was originally. The pilot would repeat this process until the asteroid is broken into such small pieces that they'll be deflected by earth's atmosphere.
I'm still working on how the ship and asteroid fragments would warp to the other side of the field when they hit the edges, though... probably why NASA decided against this approach. That, and they wanted to avoid ripping off The Last Starfighter too much.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
This program is just a smokescreen for the government to spend even more $billions on Star Wars "missile defense" without admitting it.
The chances of getting hit by an asteroid are extremely small. The chances of getting screwed by our foreign energy dependence is 100% (just look at the news already). If we were spending this money on actual threat priorities, we'd be spending it getting out of the crosshairs of foreign energy suppliers. But we're not. We're spending it on Star Wars.
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make install -not war
edit: Would an explosion in space even function in the same manner?
Because I don't want to miss a thing!
...always wondered what happened to them after their big radio hit ""Keep Your Hands to Yourself".
... will give me a better chance of losing my virginity within the next 2-5 years.
Engineers say a bee can't flap its wings and fly; and it cannot. A bee (and for that matter, flies) remain airborne because their wings trace an s-like path through the air, allowing them to move through the air in much the same way as a shark.
Think of it like a ceiling fan that goes back and forth. If it didn't have the ability to turn back on itself, it wouldn't do much to the air. However, if the blades bent in different directions for each direction, it would be able to produce a downdraft.
The best magazine in the universe.
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I would like to know what margin of error would be required in order for Apophis to hit Earth? not large, I'll bet.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
I, for one, wish the Flash ad window did not land on top of the first article.
i hear there are public linux groups that meet in men's restrooms the world over. put an end to those dick smoking fags. kill them all.
If only someone would come up with a complicated plan, then explain it with a simple analogy!
I really think we should test this out on the moon first.
Signed,
The Cowardly Lion
Anyone remember the stats on the copper slug from the Deep Impact mission? Notice the volume and mass of that thing in comparison to some of the more common nuclear arsenal warheads? Co-inky-dink? I don't think so...
Regardless, I'm not sure how well the deflection approach could even work (never been tried.) It would need some long-term advance intercept to do enough. The direct hit approach is probably still under consideration too. It would be useful for city-killer threshold sized asteroids/comets. If they became meteor-buckshot the atmosphere would have a good chance of burning 'em up. But for region, continent, or planet killer sized objects, nukes are more likely still going iffy or useless. Still better than nothing, as its insurance against more common smaller objects.
Only thing that may come of this if effective is that some point in the future you might have nuclear powers arguing about which one saved the planet. Might make for a fun sci-fi plot somewhere if plausible enough.
Can you please explain to me what similarities there are between the hydrodynamic motion of a shark and the beating wings of a bumblebee? I am intrigued by your ideas, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I hate printers.
This is the wrong day for this newsstory.
... because there is no way to erase that -- not even with a bomb.
This is the worst day for such a joke.
Never forget!
Come to think, maybe that's why I despise nuclear energy...
Oh, well, what do I know.... I'm human, too. 8-/
then explain it with a simple analogy!
Well see, it's like a car...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They claim 10-100 times more effective than other methods. First of all they dont define more effective. Second of all, they seem to dismiss ideas like a gravity tug out of hand as not developed enough.
The idea of throwing nukes at an object of potentially unknown size bugs me, especially when much more controlled options exist. All that needs to be done is to nudge the NEO out of small zones known as "keyholes" that are small, finite portions of space where the pull of the Earth will push the object into a collision course on its next orbit rather than another random non-intersecting orbit.
A fairly massive object (something a Delta IV Heavy could launch) would be perfectly capable of handling an Apophis sized object with enough lead time (on the order of years, but certainly less than decades), by flying in formation with the object in the right location to shift its orbit slightly. This is a lot easier than Apollo, which we pulled off in less than 10 years, so to dismiss it as too difficult is ridiculous, and it seems a lot more responsible than launching nukes at an object we dont fully understand.
Just my thoughts anyway.
April 13, 2029 is a Friday.
I'd also like to know how the shark moves through the air.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Liv Tyler is still hot... I hope they keep her. I hear that Cowboy Neal is going to try out for Ben Affleck's part and that the title is going to be "Armageddon II: This time we'll just shoot the fucker".
load "$",8,1
And if there are no asteroids, just direct the nukes to Argentina instead. Two birds with one stone.
The probability of the Earth catching an extinction asteroid this year is very small. Like compound interest however, over time the small fractions add up to more than one. Ultimately this outcome is not only certain, but it's certain to happen more than once. Not that we would care about the second and third times.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Plenty of Nukes have been set off high in our atmosphere. It is actually more dangerous if the nuke doesn't 'go nuclear' and disintegrates in our atmosphere. I recall a NASA incedent where a radioactive decay powered probe burned up in our atmosphere. Now virtually every living organizsm has a measurable amount of radioactive isotopes in them.
... at an asteroid. Asteroid deflected, yay us, go team. Weeks later, as radiation rains down from on high, we look back on our decision as "ill-planned" and "misguided." This is a good thing? I mean sure we avoided a mass extinction, but we caused another. Just my $0.02.
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
I remember this one! This is one where the coyote sat his ass in a slingshot then strapped himself to an acme rocket. Is that what we're doing here?
I can very easily see how an attempt to divert a near miss could turn it into an something far more dangerous.
The effects of such a blast could easily turn a meteor into a cloud of large boulders some of which will impact the earth.
With blast patterns, most of the force will push the center of gravity away from the source of the blast, some will be deflected back in the opposite direction towards the blast.
For example look at the high speed photos of an apple being shot with a bullet, some of the apple is ejected back in the direction of the bullet.
even if the debris miss us, now we will have a much higher chance of scattered smaller meteors hitting us in the next pass.
This is why the gentler approaches are preferred, keeping the meteor in one piece, by using a solar sail or ion engines.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Instead of destroying what will be a huge supply of mass and resources why dont we put it into orbit between the moon and earth. One of the major issues with space exploration is "mass and fuel" as it costs a fortune to put it into space. I think we are wasting a huge opportunity here to accelerate space exploration while making it 1,000 times more cost effective.
>I'd also like to know how the shark moves through the air.
Obvious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
Nuke explosion high in the orbit was tested as a radiation shield in antibalistic missile experiments (Operation Argus, by Nick Christofilos of Lawrence Livermore fame) and it was found ineffective for the defense purpose. A side-product of these experiments with artificial radiation shields was discovery of Van Allen radiation belts.
It was later found by accident that multimegatonn explosion high in the orbit can dump lots of charged particles (mostly high-energy electrons) into Van Allen belts where they persist for many weeks during which time they gradually degrade solar panels and electronics of satelites - this happened in 60s (after operation Starfish Prime about 5 satelites went silent...)
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
My 51st birthday. If it does hit, at least I will have some student loans left when I die.
They could just fart the Earth out of the asteroid's path like they did in Futurama, and end global warming to boot!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Nothing to worry about...never mind.
Just as I figured. It's a Friday.
I wonder if we are not being told all that we should?
Great.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I think Wesley Crusher has all the "suck conversion" anyone needs...
One that, well, one that we don't like very much.
Say we could figure it accurately enough to know that the damaging effects would be limited to countries which are not our allies, and which are our sworn enemies... and say they have nukes, but they are not advanced enough to predict that the asteroid will hit them the way we have done. What if Osama bin Laden is in the path of the asteroid?
You are President of the United States and the information is currently known only to you and a small handful of NASA scientists. What do you do?
Yeah, it's a cheesy question, but do we not have an obligation to save our enemies?
It is not true at all that "most modern weapons are much cleaner than the bombes of the 50s. In fact the fusion yield of modern weapons accounts for less than 40% of the total yield, most of the yield actually comes from fission of the uranium container that doubles as a reflector. "clean weapons" can be produced by using non-fissionable reflector like lead, this causes at leat 40% increase in total weight of the weapon design while reducing the total yield approximately to one half. The example of a super-clean bomb is Tsar Bomba that exploded at about 52MT, a lead-reflected test of a 100MT design.
For military the intense radiation from fission of the uranium reflector is an "added bonus". The premium in thermonuclear warhead design is on light weight and narrow diameter (long narrow-cone re-entry vehicles have much better precision than fat ones) in compromise with low cost (low consumption of expensive materials like tritium and plutonium) and high reliability.
The clean weapon was a temporary fad in 50s and early 60s, it was used by rival weapon design team to justify existence of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and was oversold, being seized upon by politicians it got disproportionate coverage in print - but it never resulted in a weaponised design. The reality is that even a "clean" bomb designs are still an order of magnitude dirtier than Hiroshima and don't offer any military advantage so they are not stockpiled. The peaceful uses of clean nukes like digging harbors and re-livening natural gas and oil fields never materialized as it turned out that produced crater (or gas) was unpleasantly radioactive (because of neutron-induced radiation, with long-lived radioisotopes like C-14 and tritium)
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
I was thinking of some of the very dirty bombs of the 50s.
My bad.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
How does one safely get a nuclear device into orbit? Current launch vehicles have a nasty habbit of failing.
How long is the shelf life of such a device in orbit and exactly how do they plan to dispose of it should it malfunction or reach end of life.
a.k.a. Dr. Strangelove not to blow his wad 18 months early about this plan...
Of course, the Apophis-level event is nothing to worry about. If we're faced with the Anubis-level event, however, our attempts to use a nuclear blast to destroy the asteroid will result in a cataclysmic solar-system-destroying detonation due to the large amount of naquadah in the asteroid's core.
We'd better get to work on those hyperdrives!
All the scientists? There are lots of them you know. And I doubt they are being paid enough for each and every one of them to keep their mouths shut.
Or just another cosmic event?
Discuss amongst yourselves... if the "end of the world" happens sooner, rather than later, I don't think it will affect my inevitable fate one way or the other.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
april 13th 2029?
2+0+2+9=13
somebody wake the 911 conspiracy theorists from their slumber!
destroyed Apophis!
Momentum change [in log10(kg m/s)], given a 9,000kg vehicle launch mass:
Nuclear, Subsurface: 11.9
Nuclear, Surface: 11.5
Nuclear, Standoff - Neutron: 10.3
Nuclear, Standoff - X-ray: 9.9
Kinetic @50km/s (avg): 9.0
Kinetic @10km/s (avg): 8.5
Surface Thruster (non-rotating asteroid) @10 years: 8.1
Surface Thruster (rotating asteroid) @10 years: 7.7
Gravity Tractor, @10 years: 6.9
Conventional Explosive, Subsurface: 6.8
Conventional Explosive, Surface: 6.4
Momentum change [in log10(kg m/s)] required to deflect the following:
Hypothetical long-period 1km comet with 9-24 months to impact: 12.8
Hypothetical 1km asteroid 15yr ahead: 10.5
VD17, a 500m asteroid for 2088: 9.6
Apophis after 2029 approach, assuming a 2036 a collision prediction: 9.4
Hypothetical 200m asteroid 10 yr ahead: 8.7
Apophis by 2029 (with current orbit knowledge): 8.5
Apophis by 2029 (with highly accurate orbit knowledge): 6.3
The point of the distinction between the last two is that the probability window we have to push out of the earth's path becomes much smaller the more accurately we know the orbital parameters of the object. So the more accurately we can calculate it, the less we have to actually push it (up to a point, of course). Also, it looks like very little is gained by exploding things underground as opposed to on the surface. So we apparently aren't going to need a crack team of good-looking drilling experts after all.
I think using a modified B83 nuclear bomb to detonate on a relatively small asteroid is kind of overkill. A better solution would probably be using a smaller nuclear device derived from the B61 bomb detonated in the 35-40 kT range. All we need to do is the change the trajectory of the asteroid in question, and detonating a relatively small nuclear bomb on the asteroid may change the trajectory just enough to miss Earth by fairly substantial margins.
Like a balloon...and something bad happens!
We should be considering what it would take to steer Apophis into a stable orbit. Can you imagine the amount of raw material on that thing? It would be a heyday for science, and then the space progam, and then the economy. Any manufacturing we could do with that significant quantity of iron and rock in space rather than this precious biosphere is worth looking into, and it's a lot easier to bring things down here than to launch them up there.
And no, I don't mean making "rods from God" or any of that other military nonsense.
Here are a few examples from this documentary. BTW, I own both Atomic Bomb movies. Awsome stuff! Can't wait for the high-def version.
Life is not for the lazy.
The standoff neutron bomb. 1,001 uses.
Indeed... (The next set of numbers came from ass). Perhaps the best alternative had a probabilty of success of 0.01 percent. Maybe nukes have a 1 in 100 change of succeeding.
It's new! It's improved! Its 100X more effective...
Unlike other slashdotters, I wonder if this is really just another plot to get very long-range nukes in geo-synchronous orbit.
The higher-ups at NASA are doing one of two things:
Gee. Which one is more likely?
It seems clear that a craft that can remain on or near a target asteroid would be more efficient in detecting its actual path and gradually steering it into a safe trajectory. I am wondering now if it might also be possible for such a craft to improve the effects of a nuke by for example generating a gaseous envelope around the asteroid that could capture horizontally directed energy, if it is icy, or creating a column of pulverized bits of rocky or metallic asteroid directly beneath the nuke's standoff target, creating essentially a directed energy weapon or line of plasma bullets aimed right down the column. It would seem that there are a number of ways to soften a target in advance. Of course if the lander is sophisticated enough and arrives early enough, it should be able to create a mass driver that would nudge the asteroid away, although this would pollute space with a spray of rocks which might however be useful for their raw materials or momentum if captured later. Anyway these thoughts came to me when considering the difference between space-based and terrestrial nuclear explosions, not that I'm an expert or anything, and thinking that the column of rising gas that makes the stem of a mushroom cloud might provide thrust possibly (although if so, filling space with hot radioactive gas).
It's these people called the Gamelons. They want to take over Earth. Now I have this plan where we resurrect an old battleship...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Looks like its going to be close to Venus sometime April 24th 2016 that'd prolly make more of a mess than it would hitting earth. :)
But the really cool thing is on June 14, 2060 when this
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=99942;orb=1
shows Venus and Apophis so close that the dots overlap
That'll be fun to watch (assuming nasa's java applet is accurate and that I'm not blind in 2060)
if we do this we have a very good method of launch....
...lets say... 20,000 feet and goes off I imagine it won't do good things to us.
Obviously if it gets outside of our atmosphere and the bomb goes off not that big of a deal...
if it takes off from the launch pad gets to whatever doesn't matter...
I must also say... yea I live in the US... but if I lived anywhere else I don't think I'd want us putting nukes in orbit.
just my ~0.0145 Euros
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Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
I would feel much more comfortable with a planetary defense system that does not rely on a single, unbuilt launch vehicle.
Instead of carrying six weapons on a single platform it would be better to have smaller vehicles that can be launched on Atlas, Delta, Ariane, SpaceX falcon, etc.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
So what ? We've already set off dozens, if not hundreds of nukes all over the planet (and some in space, too). One more (especially one that detonates really, really far away from Earth) won't make things that much worse.
It then ranks the alternatives by their ability to how much speed change ("delta vee"} per second they can apply to the object as a function of the mass of the interceptor vehicle. In this comparison, unsurprisingly, nuclear explosions come out ahead.
What's less clear to me is why "slow" methods are considered less effective. A low "delta vee" applied over a period of a few months or so should also be able to deflect the object from impact.
Is it really warranted to conclude at this stage that nuclear explosions are "way ahead" of other methods?
I'll tell you why I'm a bit sceptical about the "nuclear option". It could provide legitimacy for keeping a few nuclear bombs on standby in orbit. Once we cross that threshold, what's to stop everyone who can slap a nuclear warhead on top of a big rocket (and secretly throw in a re-entry shield when no-one's looking} to put a few nuclear warheads in orbit? Who's to check that someone won't put MIRVs up there?
And besides ... I thought that the current crop of (ridiculously expensive} ABM systems focused on intercepting missiles during their boost phase. With orbiting bombs there wouldn't even be the warning of a boost phase.
Any comments from knowledgeable people?
Before clicking on this article, I tried to guess whether the "Armageddon" tag would be in positions 1st, 2nd, or 3rd.
I picked 2nd. Slashdot has let me down.
Why does america get the oppertunity to lauch weapons of mass destruction into space and other countries are being destroyed for maybe willing to build WoMD.
Can't really believe a nuke will resolve a astroid problem. What if the astroid breaks up in pieces and with the exploition travel extremely fast?
The impact of a cubic kilometer of matter (with density = 1000 kg/m3) traveling at 11 km/s is 6e+19 J. The explosion and the debris falling all over the planet would heat up the atmosphere significantly. Calculating from http://www.oco.noaa.gov/index.jsp?show_page=page_r oc.jsp&nav=universal, the atmospheric heat capacity is about 3e+18 J/K. so if the bulk of the energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, there will be about a 20-kelvin average short-term temperature increase around the globe. If the asteroid is slightly larger or denser, oven-like average temperatures are possible
April 13th 2029 is, yes you've guessed it, a Friday!
George: Dad! I wanna set off a nuke.
George snr: No George. You cant. People wont like it.
George: I.am.the.president. and if I wanna seddof a nuke I will. Now someone find me something to fire a nuke at!
Advisor: aah crap... get me nasa on the phone...
Nasa: Mr President. *sigh* We. Have a problem. See, there is this big ol' nasty astroid up in space. And we don't like. It might even kill everyone in the USA!!! (*cough* *mumble* along with the rest of the world)
George: its got weapons of mass deduction... hasn't it! hasn't it!!
Nasa: Yup! Big enough to wipe out the USA (and *cough* *mumble* every other country). You should destroy it! Hell! Its name even means the most evilest thing in the whole galaxy!
George: not... al queda?!
Nasa: No, sir, its totally much worse....
George: I know!! Why don't we fire a nuke at it!
Nasa: Great thinking, Mr President! We'll get right on it!
Advisor: *sighs and thinks: ww III narrowly averted - yet again - how long till this clowns term is over?!*
and basis for the word apocalyptic ?
For this to work it is absolutely critical that the US make this an international project, open to inspection and participation. While many might feel that the Chinese and Russians and Europeans can get lost and should not be offered participation, it is almost guaranteed that if the USA puts nuclear weapons into space without international control and participation, then the others will fear that the USA is planning to do an Iraq on them and will react by placing their own nuclear weapons in orbit, and what is more important, those will probably not be pointed away from the earth. The result will be a dangerous arms race.
sadly, with the current US government not exactly giving the impression of stability, trustworthiness or inttelligence, I fear that exactly that will happen.
I am sure the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would agree that "nuclear standoff explosions are assessed to be 10-100 times more effective than the non-nuclear alternatives".....
If this thing is going to be closer than some satellites, here's a cartoon that could creep you out. The premise was that a comet got too close and caused armageddon...
Hopefully we can deflect this one, then head to Klendathu to clean up... Damn bugs and their plasma knocking asteroids at us.
Can someone please remove the statement about it "passing closer than geosynchronous satellites," as it has already been WELL established it will come nowhere close to the moon or earth when it passes us. There will be no doomsday and we don't need to redirect it, or make misleading statments about it.
Just because I post on Slashdot, don't presume that I necessarily watch SHIT television. There...I said it.
The ships^H^H^H^H^H sharks hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. ;)
Wouldn't that fsck with the tides? Well, I guess it wouldn't after we strip-mine the rock and remove most of its mass.
I read a novel, I can't remember which, where the author made a great case for using enhanced radiation weapons against asteroids instead of conventional nuclear devices. His argument was that a non-impacting explosion using an enhanced radiation device might be able to divert even a fragile asteroid without necessarily breaking it up. The radiation from the weapon would transfer it's energy evenly to the surface of the asteroid. (Not exactly, but way better than a regular nuke) That would blow away the top layer of the asteroid on the side facing the blast, pushing the asteroid in the opposite direction. A series of such blasts might be able to divert the asteroid without causing it to break up.
I'm sure there are problems with the idea, but it seems logical to me.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Even if the asteriod misses it's supposed to back in our general vicinity around 2038, so it would probably be prudent to keep an eye on it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There is another element of a "hypothetical known impending collision (HKIC)". The orbital mechanics will give a very precise time of impact, because, if it ain't then, it ain't gonna happen. While the Ground Zero is going to vary with chaotic factors, we will know this much: "It will hit on [this] side of the planet at this time." Chances are, it would hit the Pacific Ocean. But if the groundtrack wends into heavily populated area, let's say for example, USA, then those people know that they are on the bullseye and will feel the devastation of even a Barringer Crater sized event. That is simple rocket science... But...
What is NOT simple is said locale's reaction to being on the target! WWDUBYAD? What would George Bush do? If (in this hypothetical case) the US Government knew for fact that metric oodles of its territory, including its breadbasket were going to be devastated by an asteroid, what would we do? What would China, India or Russia do?
To quote Sam Kinison: "MOOOOVE!" What we would see would be a push to move into territory that was safer than where we would be sitting then. China might move into India or the Steppes of Russia. If it were to hit the Pacific, where would Los Angeles go? Arizona? Where can you bivouac 8 million people for an indefinite period? And who will be shipping in the food?
One of the first effects of an HKIC is a directional diaspora. The blast wave of the asteroid would pale in comparison to the advancing ring of nuclear fire as one massive group clamors out of the target zone, and those already there fight for their very existence. The first HKIC will not trigger mass extinction before it triggers mass extermination.
This, more than any other reason is why planetary defense should not be handled by any one of us, but by ALL of us. A United Federation of THIS Planet!
They are a bigger threat to our existence then some rogue asteroid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v
It takes a Titan IV to accelerate something as massive as an SUV into "orbit between the earth and the moon". The delta-V is about 10Km/s, ball park, plus or minus, give or take. The delta-V of an asteroid would have to be half an order of magnitude more and what... 10 orders of magnitude more mass? Picture a Saturn V which is scaled up so that the Command Module is the size of the New Jersey.
Got it? They don't call it Rocket Science fer nothing.
As someone who has played Asteroids for hours back in the 80s, I know what happens when you shoot one. They split up into 2 Asteroids, take a new flight path, and hit you from the other side a short while later.
We best begin training our youth to become experts at Asteroids and Missle Command. They're going to need it.
I am absolutely amazed at the stunningly new idea of using a nuclear weapon to stop, prevent or ameliorate some potential disaster on earth. Gee, whiz, why didn't someone think of that idea before?
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
I'm Argentinian you insensitive clod! (seriously)
Check out my blog!
Your link says the atmosphere's heat capacity is equivalent to that of the top 3.2m of ocean. We have 361e12 square meters of ocean, so the top 3.2 meters at 1000 kg/m^3 would be about 1.16e18 kilograms of water, which at 4186 J/kg/K gives a total heat capacity of 4.84e21 J/K. So dissipating our hypothetical asteroid's 6e19 J into the whole atmosphere would raise the temperature by about 0.012 K, not 20 K.
In order to get the global community to accept a nuke in space, make it so multiple countries have to review coordinates and push a big red button for it to launch. There's ways to safeguard it.
I start with 0 and some dude with time to spare even gives me an overrated score. Can 0 be overrated?
/., there are those who don't try to answer my post but just do marketing.
But what's really amazing is the amount of bs spent trying to justify killing babies. As I said, I'm human, too, so no high horse here.
But wtf? How can one be self-delusional to such an extent?
Also, if you think people are forgetful, think crusades and think apologies after 1000+ years.
It's all media play... even here at
Questions for the Technically gifted. If we wish to change the directory or speed of the asteroid could we not increase its mass significantly? What types of matter could we send its way which would stick to it thereby increasing its mass sufficiently to cause a miss? Alternativley, are there ways in which we could change the reflective nature of the object such that it creates a primitive solar drive? Perhaps paint the sucker white or silver? Additionally, is there a way to warp space using a nuclear blast such that the relativistic effects cause a miss? What about spearing it with numerous relatively cheap and simplistic harpoons which will have a long teather which will itself deploy solar sails? What about sending out darts which peirce it and then vibrate at a specific frequency which causes the object to break up or slow down or speed up because of the vibrational effects on mass/momentum/you'rethescientisthere? Moreover, if peirced with the vibrating darts said darts using relatively simple mechanisms could ascertain the structure of the object vis a vis how said object responds to the vibrations which themselves could be varied. This information could then be relayed back to earth and used to vary the frequency of the vibration to acheive optimal effects. Actually, this is a great idea which should precede any attempt to use a nuclear stand off device. Use darts to figure out structure then determine the particulars of using any type of nukes.
And Rockhound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Buscemi/) Steve Buscemi was born on Friday the 13th.
What am I missing here?
When I was getting my degree at Harvey Mudd College, they managed to get us the opportunity to have lunch with distinguished Physicist Freeman Dyson. Someone asked Dyson a question about blowing up asteroids with nuclear weapons at the session. My recollection of the response was that he said he thought it was a bad idea that would make shrapnel and magnify the problem. Dyson told us that the best solution he could think of was to build a ship to go to the asteroid and then assemble a "mass driver". The mass driver would be a piece of equipment that broke off pieces of the asteroid and hurled them at right angles to the trajectory in an appropriate direction in order to divert the orbit. While Dyson is only one man, I suspect that his opinion on the matter might incorporate more finesse that a bunch of weapons engineers.
Your odds of being killed by an asteroid are much less than by lightning, because it is so much less likely to happen. Just because something kills lots of people when it extremely rarely happens doesn't mean it's more likely to happen.
No, but it's more likely to happen to you. If car accidents that kill 10 people happen with the exact same frequency as car accidents that kill 1 person, you are 8x more likely to be killed in the former than the latter.
It's probably not clear from the submission or perhaps even the article, but the same effect is being described in both.
When a nuclear reaction occurs, energy is released primarily in two ways:
1.) Kinetic/thermal energy carried away the reaction products and free neutrons and electrons.
2.) Radiation (mostly x-rays and gamma rays) emitted directly or by secondary effects like Bremsstrahlung (collisions of particles from method 1).
If there's a lot of extra matter around, like an atmosphere, it absorbs most of this energy, thereby converting it to more conventional effects like a shock wave, and UV/infrared/visible light.
However, in space there's little to absorb and re-emit the radiation or collide with and be displaced by the moving matter, so a far greater amount of the nuclear energy is carried away as radiation. As you said, this heats and vaporizes a thin layer of the surface. The vaporized material flies away, giving an equal and opposite impulse to the bulk of the asteroid. A minor drawback is that most of the energy is wasted, since the radiation is emitted 360 degrees around the warhead.
A similar concept would have a super-powerful laser vaporize small amounts of surface material gradually. This has an advantage of being aimable to get some steering benefit but would require much more forewarning.
I thought it interesting that they proposed six smaller warheads instead of one big one (a 10 MT bomb is not out of the question), but that not only allows them to use existing warheads, but also to have some extra control. I could see them parking the warheads in a safe position a few thousand miles from the asteroid and sending them in one at a time. After each blast, you determine the effect on its orbit, then detonate the next one at an optimized angle and distance to account for uncertainties in the position of the last warhead and the composition and density of the asteroid.
It may take more than one device to either deflect or destroy the object. Although there are no explosives of the yield of Ivy Mike (10.4 Mt) in the present stockpile, consider the crater that was formed by reason of just sitting there. There may be required a cluster of five to ten devices on one side of the body. Detonation should occur when the group of charges would be on the antisunward (night) side for maximum deflection (~90 degrees) towards the Sun. The intention is that the Sun would capture the fragment(s) and/or eject them from the solar system in hyperbolic orbits. Perhaps what may be needed is a Deep Impact delivery system with Tsar Bomba equipped impactors (mother of all bunker busters). I know many here would groan at the mention of this http://www.space1999.net/~moonbase99/collision.htm / but it was my inspiration to write this (This episode featured an array of lay-down charges to destroy an oncoming asteroid).
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
I didn't say it was compounded like interest. I said it was like compound interest. They are both expressed in ratios, fractions or percents and accumulate over time. Those similarities are enough for a fair simile. In your post you say that extinction of the human race is probable:
But then you go on to suggest we have more pressing needs. While I would disagree with "Probable" for values of probability less than .999999, let's avoid splitting hairs on this point. What is it about the probable demise of all human life that leads you to the supposition that its prevention is not a matter for current study? Will the discovery of a solution to this problem prevent the cure for cancer, prolong the quest to end hunger, cause balding in kittens? What? An untimely asteroid can solve all of those problems by making them moot. Yes there are other worthy goals to pursue but there are also many people to pursue them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.