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California Professors Unveil Proposal To Attack Asteroids With Lasers
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday's twin events with invading rocks from outer space — the close encounter with asteroid 2012 DA14, and the killer meteorite over Russia that was more than close — have brought the topic of defending mankind against killer asteroids back into the news. The Economist summarizes some of the ideas that have been bandied about, in a story that suggests Paul Simon's seventies hit "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover": Just push it aside, Clyde. Show it the nuke, Luke. Gravity tug, Doug. The new proposal is an earth orbiting, solar-powered array of laser guns called DE-STAR (Directed Energy Solar Targeting of AsteRoids) from two California-based professors, physicist Philip Lubin (UCSB) and industrial statistician Gary Hughes (Cal Polytechnic State). Lubin and Hughes say their system could be developed and deployed in a range of sizes depending on the size of the target: DE-STAR 2, about the size of the International Space Station (100 meters) could nudge comets and asteroids from their orbits, while DE-STAR 4 (100 times larger than ISS) could evaporate an asteroid 500 meters in diameter (10 times larger than 2012 DA14) in a year. Of course, this assumes that the critters could be spotted early enough for the lasers to do their work."
Wouldn't it be much more efficient (and cheaper) to just use mirror arrays to focus the sunlight directly, rather than use expensive and inefficient solar panels to process the sunlight into a laser first?
Then, instead of sitting uselessly in space 99.999% of the time (or maybe 100%, even), they could focus sunlight onto ground-based power stations (or space-based, if we actually get mining operations going up there), and help pay for themselves.
It would also be a bit harder to weaponize. A DE(ath)-STAR in orbit? What could possibly go wrong?
Sorry for being a pessimist, but I'm old enough to remember Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
Consider a trillion dollar weapon of mass destruction in space.
It will never get through Congress.
There will be construction delays lasting a century.
Your enemies will be able to destroy it, cheaply.
Bright high school students will play with it.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
You are right. We've never been hit by anything larger. We should definitely wait until something gets really, really close before we take any action.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You're absolutely right, from a biological perspective. There have only been a handful of impacts that did any serious damage to the biosphere, but those mostly wiped out everything except for a few "lottery winners" low on the food chain. Humanity, well all mammals really, kind of won the last round when all the dominant animal life was killed off and "rodents" were able to inherit the Earth. However the asteroid that would destroy New York (city or state, your choice) isn't even worth mentioning on those scales, and humanity is occupying an ever larger portion of the surface. Just think of how much the damage would have cost had that Russian meteor blown out the windows in a major metropolitan area, and that one was downright tiny.
Plus, unlike the "war on terror" that has spent ~$1.5 Trillion to little effect beyond deposing some marginally related governments, a system that can deflect dangerous asteroids away from us also has considerable productive use as well: we could deflect valuable asteroids into near-Earth orbit, even capture them into stable Earth or Lunar orbits for processing. That is typically the oft-unspoken goal of most of these sorts of plans, but the big money all comes from the defense department, so that's how they get pitched. Science and economic development projects have to fight over the budgetary crumbs which couldn't feed a project like this. Even the Cold War "Star Wars" missile defense program was designed to double as an asteroid guidance system, or so I've heard.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.