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Can NASA, Air Force, and Private Industry Really Mitigate an Asteroid Threat?
coondoggie writes "There has been much chatter about the threat of an asteroid or significant meteor strike on Earth — mostly caused by the untracked meteor that blasted its way to international attention when it exploded in the sky above Russia injuring nearly 1,200 people in February. It was one of those amazing coincidences that on that same day an asteroid NASA had been tracking for months — asteroid 2012 DA14 — was to harmlessly cross Earth's path. Those events and the topic of mitigating asteroid and meteor or Near Earth Object threats to Earth prompted a couple congressional hearings by the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, the latest of which was held this week. None of the NEOs found to date have more than a tiny chance of hitting Earth in the next century. Thus the near-term risk of an unwarned impact from large asteroids, and hence the majority of the risk from all NEOs, has been reduced by more than 90%. Assuming none are found to be an impact threat, discovering 90% of the 140 meter sized objects will further reduce the total risk to the 99% level. By finding these objects early enough and tracking their motions over the next 100 years, even those rare objects that might be found threatening could be deflected using existing technologies."
This year comet Siding Spring was discovered that may hit Mars at over 200000 mph next year. If that was headed for Earth there is nothing we could do except have an extinction party.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Big meteors only explode over Russia, if I'm extrapolating correctly from n=2. Therefore they should pay for it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
When there's an incoming asteroid, use a rocket to place a USB stick on it loaded with copyrighted material.
Within 2 hours, it's trajectory will be altered by the mass of the layers and federal agents swarming it.
Just paint stars and stripes on it and North Kimmy will take it out for free.
Table-ized A.I.
Unlikely.. but they will gladly make the public believe that something must be done, and then spend a whole lot of money doing something. See also: TSA.
Sig ?
Most species becomes space faring, the smart ones like Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal leave as soon as they can. The reason we don't hear from anyone else is because they put up warning signs.
You don't need fancy theories to explain why every other object in the universe is fleeing from us.
No. At least the US wouldn't react that way. Why? Because NORAD tracks all kinds of things and the profile of a meteor looks nothing like a missile. The missile comes in a parabolic arc at less than escape velocity. The meteor comes in much faster, on a straight line. When you extrapolate back the trajectory you get space, not Russia.
I assume the Russians and Chinese have similar tracking capability. We also know from experience that even if the Russian systems send a false positive, their commanders have the guts to say nyet. That happened during the Cold War.
Rogue nations like North Korea? That's a different story; but they don't have enough bombs to end civilization.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hey, that's what I was going to say!
Why not mitigate a real threat, like public ignorance?
The real motivation is to mine the asteroid for rare earth minerals.
Doing it this way they won't have to pay anyone for the minerals,
and if they do it right they can get you and I to pay for the trip......
Rick B.
I'm more worried about a Korean threat!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
No.
Correct. In details:
* NASA - interested in cosmic objects farther away - the minimal distance Mars (Moon is sooo 1960-ish it's no longer "space")
* Air Force - busy dealing with fiscal cliffs and sequesters when they aren't pulling their hair over the F-35 project
* Private industry - there's no profit to be made nor tax exemption opportunities. Even more, the ones that would have the budget to attempt something like this are multinationals - the risk of being affected are much lower than the potential profit they'd make would an asteroid actually strike
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
One of the side thoughts I had about this was military applications. If we can capture asteriods or chunks of rocks, can we drop them into orbit to land on a city? A non-nuclear threat? I was of course thinking of the book "The moon is a harsh mistress".. Otherwise, why is NASA so interested in the topic?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
There have been no serious asteroid impacts in millennia, if not millions of years. That tells you that these events are extremely rare, and calling them a "threat" is just not justified.
If anything, space travel and the ability to steer asteroids raises the risk that humans will try to steer asteroids towards earth and use them as gigantic kinetic bombs (fortunately, very slow moving).
Hello morons. NASA didn't know about the rock that exploded over Russia until it was too late. None of these bastards can be trusted when they start gibbering on about risks. The truth is THEY ARE FUCKING BLIND. A mole has a better time finding its way in broad daylight than we do seeing crap in space.
They give us highly detailed pictures of very small parts of the night sky. Great. Awesome in fact. However, we actually DON'T have the kind of wide scale whole sky studying system required to make ANY reliable risk assessments -- Based on... What?! The TINY patches of sky we have studied with great detail, and some other images from murky underfunded telescopes -- Which didn't even detect that we had A DAMN DWARF PLANET called Eris (more massive than Pluto) orbiting our Sun until Just 8 years ago -- they're making risk predictions? Don't make me laugh. Seriously. That's why Pluto's not a planet. If it were we'd have to own up to the fact that there was another PLANET there all along and we didn't see it.... Grr.
THINK people. The geologic record shows we're over due for a mass extinction event. Might not be an asteroid, maybe gamma burst or volcanic eruption, etc. The point is that we really don't have much of any information at all in any of these respects -- Not the kind we'd need to kick back and rest on our laurels like dinosaurs proclaiming, "Yeah, a few little rocks fell, but no harm really, the sky's not falling..." Right before the sky did fall right on their big ignorant heads.
I'm not saying we should panic. I'm saying we need to make a concious decision as a race to not become extinct -- To not let our light go out of the Universe just because of greed. We need to swap the budgets of the armed forces and the space programs until this shit is sorted. Once we have more space infrastructure to ensure we're not going to be extincted by the next big rock, THEN we can worry about fighting over petty shit on this planet. All our eggs are in one basket here on Earth. That's moronic. We NEED a self sustaining off-world colony of humans just to ensure the survival of our species. Until we have at least that, then YES, we are in SUPREME DANGER of becoming extinct; In fact, it's a 1:1 probability that our extinction will occur at present.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled not giving a damn about anything beyond your own lifespan. Screw you humans. You'll get yours.
We're already in a mass extinction event. We're wiping out species at a pace that, in a geological-time sense, is indistinguishable from a big asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruption.
And yes, humans are moronic. The kind of investment in humanity's immortality probably won't be made until someone has conquered the entire planet and subjugated the people to such an extent that he doesn't need a huge military budget--and then the effort will be made only if that is the world leader's whim, instead of, say, constructing monuments to himself.
--PM