Slashdot Mirror
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."
We just need one more *orginization* to save us from typos and humanity is saved ...
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.
"Orginization" (in the headline) should be spelled "Organization"
That's nothing. Look how they misspelled "Space Dragons".
Nuking is a very bad idea. Much better painting it in white. Or but a bus next to it. Phil Plait put some thoughts together http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjECbQ1r-k0
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
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.
I dual boot 7 & Mint. I use FF and Chrome in both (90%+ of the time Chrome in Mint). All have inline spell check. Only IE doesn't (or didn't last time I used it), but I would think IE usage is pretty low here. Is it that hard to figure out how to turn spell check on?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
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.
Yep. And, early detection is most important. Waiting til the damned huge ass rock is a month away ensures that our best efforts will be worth shit. If we can get a team on the rock a year before impact, even a tiny deflection in it's course will work to avert disaster.
Of course, a nuke isn't necessary, if you get on the rock early enough. A few tons of thrust from a chemical rocket would be good enough. Or, a chemical bomb dropped down the well that you've drilled. Nukes are sexy, but not essential.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.)
I think the nuke idea came from Edward Teller, who was basically a pyromaniac given a government grant.
He was just jazzed to blow up things, and applying gigantic nuclear explosions to meteorites would have given him jack-off material for the rest of his life.
Of course I think he's dead now, so we can do something that a sane person would.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I'm not sure you understand the issue. A nuke won't actually make an asteroid disappear in a ball of flame. This is not an episode of Star Wars where you fly through the debris of your kill. This is reality, where detonating an asteroid with a nuclear bomb just turns it into millions of pounds of rocks and dust that will hit the earth anyway. As it is the dust that will kill the whole planet's ecosystem, a nuke is the opposite of the right idea.
This is the society that in the last decade has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets. If we can't find and catalogue all of the near-earth threats in time to do something sane about them, we've got huge problems. The issue is not of technological capability. It is one of simple fucking priorities.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
actually it should be spelt organisation,
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
If we can clone Bruce Willis and make a frozen stockpile it means we can bombard the space disaster with a mass of ice cold bruce willi missiles until its velocity is changed (this may be known as the yippie ki yay effect) such that it is safely deflected back into space thus solving the problem for ever. Maybe I haven't thought this plan through, but it seems no less reasonable than any other plan that makes no sense.
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.
This is reality, where detonating an asteroid with a nuclear bomb just turns it into millions of pounds of rocks and dust that will hit the earth anyway. As it is the dust that will kill the whole planet's ecosystem, a nuke is the opposite of the right idea.
That's a great mix of science and bullshit you've got going on.
Yes, you're correct that a nuke would turn a solid core object into a shotgun blast of rubble.
No, you're not correct that the danger is from the dust flying through space. The dust you're thinking of is what gets kicked up into the atmosphere following an actual impact.
If you could reduce the solid object into rubble, yes it will still hit the atmosphere. But any of the individual pieces which are small enough will simply burn up before impact, and won't have any significant impact on the atmosphere or ecosystem.
As a practical experiment to demonstrate the principle, do this. Get a solid block of ice from your local grocery store. Set it on your kitchen counter. Get a second one, and use a hammer to smash it into pea-sized chunks. Leave this on another counter. Pay attention to which melts first- the solid block or the pile of rubble.... hint: it will be the rubble.
Having said all that, launching a nuke isn't really much of an option in the first place. Most of the destructive power from a nuke is actually a result of the shockwave caused when you detonate one within a pressurized environment, in our case the atmosphere. In space, there's no pressure so all you get is energy release in the form of radiation... which means other than irradiating it and possibly melting part of it due to the heat generated when the radiation hits the object, a nuke won't really do much at all. You would have to pull a Hollywood stunt and actually Bruce Willis into the object for an explosion to have any significant effect, and even then it wouldn't reduce it to rubble but more likely just split it into a few very large chunks.
And if it was not a single solid core object, but a collection of rubble or just a very low density, then we'd really be shit out of luck. Of course, it wouldn't have nearly as much of a chance to actually impact the planet, and more would burn up in the atmosphere.
In any event, the biggest issue with deflecting an asteroid is that they don't usually just float along. They spin and tumble. So attaching a thruster or a bomb would probably not be effective even ignoring all the other issues.