Paintball Pellets As a Tool To Deflect Asteroids

SternisheFan sends this quote from an article at MIT's Technology Review: "In the event that a giant asteroid is headed toward Earth, you’d better hope that it’s blindingly white. A pale asteroid would reflect sunlight — and over time, this bouncing of photons off its surface could create enough of a force to push the asteroid off its course. How might one encourage such a deflection? The answer, according to an MIT graduate student: with a volley or two of space-launched paintballs. Sung Wook Paek, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, says if timed just right, pellets full of paint powder, launched in two rounds from a spacecraft at relatively close distance, would cover the front and back of an asteroid, more than doubling its reflectivity, or albedo. The initial force from the pellets would bump an asteroid off course; over time, the sun’s photons would deflect the asteroid even more."

Comments

Probability and magnitude are both relevant

[perpenso]

The chance of getting killed by a car when crossing the road is orders of magnitude larger than the chance of getting killed by an asteroid.

True. However one asteroid can kill all of us, unlike one car.

The probability of an event must be combined with the magnitude of an event when assessing the risk.

Re:Too tenuous

[paiute]

That's a long shot plan right there.

I think sending Bruce Willis with a thermonuclear device and a boatload of family drama might work even better.

Modded funny but is actually insightful. What would happen is that the chance of the giant asteroid actually hitting the earth will start out less than certain, so the large expense of sending a mission to deflect it far from earth using a gentle push would result in debate and delay. Then the odds of impact will increase, but the expense of the mission will still be high. We will piss and moan, and a loud minority of self-anointed space experts who begin to say that the rock is actually going to miss, that it is all a liberal/conservative/alien conspiracy, that there is really no asteroid, etc. will get a lot of press. Finally the thing will be visible from earth and the shit will hit the fan but by then it will be too late to use mild persuasion, and we will have to send up whoever passes for Bruce Willis with a crapload of nukes. We will blow it into chunks, maybe even into gravel whose kinetic energy strips away the atmosphere.