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International Organization To Assess Earth Defense From Space Dangers
arisvega writes in with a story about an international organization that is trying to come up with options to save the planet from a large asteroid or comet collision. "NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision (PDF) path with our planet. The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week. It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US. It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions. Industrial partners, which include the German, British and French divisions of the big Astrium space company, will consider the engineering architecture required to deflect one of these bodies out of our path."
Drill & nuke!
"Orginization" (in the headline) should be spelled "Organization"
Does NO ONE do spell checking anymore? It takes 10 seconds!
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Seriously. Fiction is ripe with way better names than that. Next time just swipe one! I'd feel much safer in the hands of the Earth Defense Force.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
New Avengers, assemble!!!
Failing that, we still have Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, and Aerosmith.
I, for one, welcome our Dangerous Space Overlords.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Currently, the B612 Foundation http://www.b612foundation.org/b612/ is interested in similar stuff but is an NGO. Although they have a much smaller budget (and to some extent do more in the way of lobbying rather than direct research) They have the virtue of having a much better name than "NEOShield." B612 is the name of the asteroid in "The Little Prince".
The group NEOshield from their reports seems to have correctly acknowledged that using a big nuke to just blow up an asteroid is not a good solution. However, it does seem like they aren't very sure what would be the actual best thing to concentrate on.
Many not build upon the Hollywood's decades of pain staking research into the subject. Clearly the cheapest, quickest, and most effective manner is to send Bruce Willis into space with a nuke. Problem solved.
If we want to avoid collisions like that the most important thing to work on would be the detection of potentially dangerous objects and the accurate prediction of their trajectories. Deflection techniques won't receive funding until we have proof that the danger is real, now if we know it 20-30 years in advance that will be enough time to develop and deploy some kind of deflection. Also, if we want these to work we need a lot of very accurate information of the target object. So while these plans are certainly interesting I believe expanding our knowledge of asteroids is helping much more in avoiding such a catastrophe in the future.
Hungry and out of work scientists create a reason to collect a paycheck yet not be expected to actually work for it.
They are looking at the issue from the wrong direction. We should not work for ways to destroy or deflect an asteroid. There are many other things that can cause catastrophic loss of life on this planet, from 'mega-volcanoes', nuclear war, epidemic diseases, and yes even -gasp- climate change.
Instead of moving the danger of our path, we should be moving ourselves off the path of danger. We need an off site backup for humanity at least, if not as much of the biosphere as we could manage. Eventually, something WILL destroy 99.9% of life on Earth. It has happened before and will again, whether 10 years or 10,000 years from now.
Silence is a state of mime.
The are presently reviewing a Space Defense System that consists of a miles long series of defensive shields protecting a rail-mounted missile platform with gaps between the shields creating launch apertures. The missile platform can be operated remotely, much in the same way as current UAV drones. However, there is no missile guidance control and the display is very pixelated with only 1-bit color depth. if you ask me, they'll need to vastly improve the graphics if they want to see this proposal get accepted.
Just because it's improbable, doesn't mean it's impossible...
While both scenarios are extremely improbable, I wonder what the odds are of being struck by an extinction level asteroid or comet vs being invaded or flat out destroyed by aliens. (I'm assuming that the alien invasion scenario probably hasn't happened in the past because there were no technological beings here for them to worry about.)
The Koch brothers roam free...
Who else read the title and got distracted thinking about alien attacks before they even got to the summary?
Ouch
Is the best way to protect us from 'The One'.
"Do you hear that? It is the sound of inevitability. I'm going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Asteroid."
Oh wait, wrong movie.
Silence is a state of mime.
simply make the object pass through us of course.. use existing technologies to do it? no that would make sense.
A battery of earth-based mirrors focused on the asteroid creating a jet effect as the heated melting rock expels.
It's a German lead European operation, that alone makes it more effective and stronger than anything from the US or B612.
Will Doctor Who do contract work for them, perchance?
I am disappointed, they do not say :p
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Since NEOs in the size range 100 - 500 m are at least an order of magnitude more frequent than km-sized objects, it seems prudent to focus mitigation planning on the smaller size range
That's not very good thinking. What if the larger ones do much more damage?
Given the political and ethical problems associated with nuclear explosive technology, this method is generally considered appropriate only in extreme circumstances in which no other current mitigation option is viable (e.g. short warning time or NEO diameter larger than 1 km).
Ethical problems? With nuking an asteroid that was going to hit the earth? What are they?
It sounds like they are letting politics drive their key engineering decisions.
The approval of an internationally recognized decision-making authority would be an essential prerequisite to the deployment of powerful explosive devices on space missions.
I think if an asteroid were actually about to hit the earth most political problems would dissolve.
Large Near Earth Asteroidss are not the real threat to our planet; large comets inbound from the Oort Cloud pose a much greater threat because the response time would be measured in months in a best-case scenario. While conjecture about whether we nuke or bump or tow Near Earth Asteroids is a wonderful way to gain funding for detection and mitigation programs the true threat is being ignored. The impacts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter left little doubt of what would happen if Earth was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
If money wasn't such a problem (being the number one thing that is grinding all technological advancement to a halt), this would've been thought of much sooner, along with all the other potential dangers to the planet.
Residing in orbits not nearly as long elliptical. Coming to a theatre near you!
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Sure. It's all fun and games, until someones gets a home planet poked out.
Metric x Imperial ? Matrix Imperial ? Baroque coding - and engineering - practices ? Positive gravity valued constants ? Craftsmens pride ? Guilds, even.
I'm sure it will be 'ass' successful, and safe, as their communal trade and economic systems, for example.
Maybe, first, they should set up an Anti-Earth-Defense-Missile Missile Defense system. Or more. Multiple footballs, like ICBM or sub launching proocol. Where's Laputa, when you need it?
The "assessment" has been completed and - in a very objective way - has found that we need more funding.
Just make these really really really big magnifying fresnels, gas bubbles in magnetic fields ... whatever, and ablate the soft rocky ones. The nickel-irons can be 'mythbusted' out of the way, somehow fun.
Or, given sufficient forewarning, a world fancon can be organized in a parrallel orbit. Its mass would probably deflect the object all the way back. Or US tourists. They'd bring it all back in little pieces, as souvenirs - doing all the hard work for once.
The trouble is, once they go back to their respective belts, and clouds, they stir up more company to come back he next time around.
How about cleaning up the room, I mean, that messy asteroid belt - not to mention those horrendous comet clouds, out there?