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New Best Way To Nuke a Short-Notice Asteroid
doug141 writes "A scientist proposes the best way to deal with an asteroid on short notice is to hit it with an impactor, followed by a nuke in the crater. From the article: 'Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, described the system his team is developing to attendees at the International Space Development Conference in La Jolla, Calif., on May 23. The annual National Space Society gathering attracted hundreds from the space industry around the world.
An anti-asteroid spacecraft would deliver a nuclear warhead to destroy an incoming threat before it could reach Earth, Wie said. The two-section spacecraft would consist of a kinetic energy impactor that would separate before arrival and blast a crater in the asteroid. The other half of the spacecraft would carry the nuclear weapon, which would then explode inside the crater after the vehicle impacted.'"
...his name is the sound his plan would make.
Bong Wie!
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just... push the asteroid out of the way?
Or we could have Bruce Willis and his team dig a hole to put the nuke in.
Will this be in time for the one coming near us on the 31st?
Any object small enough to be destroyed this way would be best avoided by evacuating the locale where it is going to hit.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Don't asteroids usually spin? If you blast a crater on one side, then you have some serious aiming to do to hit the crater?
Looking at the article it does not look like they take into account the rotation of the asteroid. So do asteroids not rotate?
Even with a small rotation your nuclear bomb would miss the crater without some extra guidance which is not shown.
A nudge I can understand if there is any way to create enough energy to push something that large out of the way, but what is the point of the nuke? How do we know this doesn't end up creating lots of smaller asteroids?
"The goal would be to fragment the asteroid into many pieces, which would then disperse along separate trajectories."
Uhhh. Ok.
"Wie believes that up to 99 percent or more of the asteroid pieces could end up missing the Earth, greatly limiting the impact on the planet."
Hell of a bet to take on a hunch. Where are the simulation runs or is this a touchy-feely? How do you know it won't vapourize a nice big hole inside like the underground nuclear tests?
"Of those that do reach our world, many would burn up in the atmosphere and pose no threat."
More ifs.
Sounds kind of flaky but he's got a $100K grant which I hope will answer these and good they are looking at *something*. I don't want to be an exhibit in a future sentient cockroach museum.
So instead on on object hitting the earth, we'll have many fragments that are radioactive, great!
In reality the first we'll hear about one of these asteroids is when it becomes visible, which will be when it warns up, which will be when it hits our atmosphere, which will be about 1 second before impact!
So instead of an asteroid hit, we get a nuclear asteroid hit? I mean, in the case where the asteroid doesn't get deflected and it still hits us. Awesome!
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If we'd be able to make a hole and then point a nuke into that hole we'd also be able to have it 'land' on the surface an explode/push the asteroid to a different track. Maybe 2 or 3 in a row.
Even if you could destroy an asteroid of significant magnitude with a nuke, it would be just as dangerous and less predictable afterwards.
I find it hard to believe that this is all a scientist can come up with.
Us 'old guys' know how to kick some serious ass....
...is going to hit it. With an impactor.
Meanwhile, my alma mater's big project is going to be a pork-barreled animal disease lab within eyesight of 50,000 respiratory tracts on gamedays. Ad Astra, my ass.
All a nuclear device would do in space is heat it up, pretty rapidly, maybe enough to thermal-stress-fracture it into several pieces, but nevertheless a nuclear weapon in space is not going to blow an asteroid (or anything else) to bits.
It's this thing called physics and specifically, astrophysics. You break these roids up into smaller pieces. The gravity of nearby planets and the sun would have a far more drastic effect on the smaller pieces as well as the energy from the explosion modifying the trajectory of the pieces.
I imagine the nuke shatters the asteroid, sending chunks flying, and Newton 2 then comes into play diverting the main body just enough to miss us.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It is if it goes off deep inside the thing (hence the crater and penetrating warhead). No air needed for shockwave - the material of the asteroid will do fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If the asteroid has any rotational motion then the crater created by the first impactor will have moved out of the way of the second.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
All a nuclear device would do in space is heat it up, pretty rapidly, maybe enough to thermal-stress-fracture it into several pieces, but nevertheless a nuclear weapon in space is not going to blow an asteroid (or anything else) to bits.
The heat would vapourize the rock, which would at least expand and exert some force on the rest of the asteroid. If the nuke was embedded in the asteroid before exploding, the vapourised rock would expand inside the asteroid, and probably significantly fracture the asteroid, perhaps into several pieces. And those individual pieces, as well as being less mass than the combined mass before (because of the mass lost to vapourised rock) would also be on a different trajectory to before, and so perhaps missing earth entirely. I think that's the point.
Also, don't think of asteroids as necessarily solid rock like you'd find on earth. They are just as likely to be coalesced space rubble, and not very tightly bound together due to insufficient gravity.
Sounds kind of flaky but he's got a $100K grant...
Come on, you gotta let people play with money in ways that are so slim to succeed that they'll need to ask for more to play with. It's how the aste.. err.. WORLD goes 'round.
And also, maybe he'll get to play with a nuke or at least watch during a test. Everyone wants to do it!
:-)
No, they wouldn't --- acceleration due to gravity is independent of the mass of the body. (The force due to gravity is GMm/r^2; acceleration is a=F/m; therefore the acceleration due to gravity is GMm/mr^2. The two m factors cancel out.)
What would happen is the nuke would push the fragments apart. These would continue to diverge, but would follow much the same course as the original asteroid. Whether they've been deflected enough to miss the Earth --- which is, of course, a really big target --- depends entirely on how hard the nuke pushed them and how long they travel before impact.
All a nuclear device would do in space is heat it up, pretty rapidly, maybe enough to thermal-stress-fracture it into several pieces, but nevertheless a nuclear weapon in space is not going to blow an asteroid (or anything else) to bits.
Well, we have to play with toys and money to test that and be sure.
If the asteroid is spinning (as it surely must be) then this maneuver is much harder...
Depending on the asteroid size and composition I'd be worried that the warhead would drill through the asteroid entirely and exit out the far side. I guess you could start a watchdog timer to trigger a few ms after impact no matter what.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Yep, even if the asteroid were pulverized, the kinetic energy still would be absorbed by the atmosphere and possibly turn the biosphere into an oven.
Two things:
1. Doing nothing means much worse damage, if not extinction. Under those circumstances, I don't see why sending lots of nuclear ordinance would be a bad thing.
2. Fragmenting a big rock means you get smaller rocks. Smaller objects that are fragments of one bigger object will have more surface area, which will mean more protection from atmospheric forces during entry. It also means less damage due to simple F = ma physics - reduce the mass, reduce the force to any specific area. I'd much rather have 200 smaller asteroids pepper the Pacific and maybe some farmland in China and the western US than one big ass rock land in the ocean and cause a tsunami that wipes out a third of a continent.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Wouldn't our atmosphere be poisoned by nuclear fallout?
What sort of debris would actually find its way down?
My first thought was "okay, send up hundreds or thousands of high explosive devices distributed evenly on the surface of the oncoming rock to form a giant shotgun blast to try to reduce one big thing into a whole bunch of small things which would burn up in the atmosphere.
That might only blast away the surface of the rock leaving behind a large core of the original and a lot of debris particles, but you know? Lather, rinse, repeat as needed. And of course, all of that crap has to stay in orbit ready to be launched.
I am sure all of this is much more complicated than I imagine it to be but I think the generalities are basically sound.
We have amazing ability to destroy vast portions of our planet. Why are significantly smaller rocks such a challenge? (Oh, that's right, because the targets are actually people, not the planet.)
To keep the device in my backyard ready for launch. The Smiths live next door and they've been getting ahead lately.
To be fair, regardless of simulations, proofs etc. having 50 asteroids of mass 1 tonne each impacting the earth at the same time is *way* less risky than having a single asteroid of 50 tonnes impact - at the very least more of the mass will be burned off in the atmosphere, also the distributed nature, and lower individual impact energies, of the fragments will almost certainly result in less loss of life and less climate change...
Sounds great until you realize that all asteroids have all kinds of spin. This not only makes hitting the same hole problematic, but even if you did the hole may not be pointed at a direction you want the ejected thrusting gasses to fly....
A nudge I can understand if there is any way to create enough energy to push something that large out of the way, but what is the point of the nuke? How do we know this doesn't end up creating lots of smaller asteroids?
That's specifically how it works. The idea is that lots of small pieces are less damaging than the big chunk, because each little chunk can burn on its own instead of one big chunk making it to the ground. A bunch of small pieces reaching the ground do less damage than one big chunk (something the size of a house hitting the ocean is a tsunami, something the size of a city is a shockwave, and so on) so busting it up reduces the total damage by a huge amount even if total deflection isn't possible.
Hell of a bet to take on a hunch. Where are the simulation runs or is this a touchy-feely? How do you know it won't vapourize a nice big hole inside like the underground nuclear tests?
Firstly, setting up such a simulation is trivial so I'm sure it would be part of the plan. And to answer your question, vaporizing a big hole in one side would be extremely effective, since unlike an underground detonation there's no atmosphere in space. Turning a sizable divot in one side of an asteroid into liquid or gas would turn the divot into a natural rocket jet, as the matter blew off into space unrestricted by any air pressure. That kinetic energy would push the asteroid in a predictable direction, and that's the whole point of the operation.
Virg
Actually, for most asteroids, the nuke is the best way to impart kinetic energy on it.
The blast will evaporate the top layer of the asteroid, giving impulse to the rest of it in the other direction.
DON'T!
Why not?
Nuke the site in orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Captcha: maneuver
Even it works, it implies knowing in advance of at least 1 year that it is coming (and sometimes the time since notice is far shorter, even if should be easier to spot bigger ones). Maybe with more of these we could improve detection rate before is too late.
I'm no astrophysicist, but it seems to me that if you break the asteroid apart, and all the fragments still fall into Earth's atmosphere, a smaller mass of debris will strike the surface because more of it will vaporize in the atmosphere, due to greater surface area (of many fragments versus one single asteroid). Now whether that's enough to make a worthwhile difference, I dunno.
For the atmosphere to be heated up by the kinetic energy in an asteroid (or a bunch of fragments of one), it'd have to be a really enormous asteroid. We've had lots of asteroid impacts in our prehistory and they didn't turn the biosphere into an oven.
About 10 km in diameter would do it.
A little bit of trivia, over 40 tons of space debris hits the earth every day. The earth can handle a lot of small asteroids much better than it can handle one large asteroid.
That is true, but it really doesn't matter all that much if 1.0e9 tons hit you in the form of a few large fragments or a million small ones.
Firing birdshot, buckshot and slugs has exactly the same effect on the target?
You are aware that our planet is continuously peppered by space debris, amounting to something like 10000 to 1000000 tonnes per year?
Seen any nuclear winters lately as a result of all those impacts? Or those "toxic nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere heating" you're talking about?
There's an ocean of air above our heads, thousands of kilometers deep, perfectly capable of absorbing all of the impact from the smaller objects - be it kinetic or chemical.
The big objects are a problem cause they make it through those thousands of kilometers largely intact.
Just like with birdshot.
Stand far away, and it won't even scratch the target.
Fire a slug of the same mass, from the same distance and with the same load, and it will go right through the target.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
He did used to take month-long vacations in the stratosphere, and he strolled all alone through a fallout zone, so...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Build a triangular shaped ship and just blast the asteroids into smaller chunks, then smaller pieces and then finally destroy them altogether.
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
I have heard that this is actually worse --- because the smaller fragments are more efficient at transferring heat to the atmosphere, while a single big impact will absorb a lot of energy into the crust and reflect a bunch more into space. So an asteroid-sized dust cloud hitting the Earth at 11km/s stands a good chance of igniting every flammable object in a thousand kilometre radius. But I can't find a reference for that.
Ten thousand duck-sized asteroids, or one asteroid-sized duck?
And there's no way she's going to pass on his crazy-ass theory to destroy the asteroid to the president! Besides, he been living in their old geodesic dome cabin in the Ozarks without a cell phone, so we'd have to send a helicopter out to get him. They dragged him into the Situation Room reeking of booze and reefer - "Sure, you'll listen to me now, now that it's too late.."
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Much better to die.
If the dinosaurs where a live, they would point at you and laugh. .. then mumble 'idiot', then eat you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe he thinks it will be an easier target when it's on the ground?
Why? Even if you're one of the folks who think the planet would be better without humans, do you also think it would be better without deer, hummingbirds, maple trees, and whale sharks? An extinction-level impact, even if it's considerably smaller than Chuxlub, will do away with all of them as well.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I am assuming that extinction level impact asteroid wont be short notice one, and smaller ones will just spread into a multiple chunks that do more damage to multiple locations.
- Raynet --> .
probably not going to be easy/possible to hit it with something strong enought to make a crater, then hit the crater witht he nuke, and then hope the blast sends it off in a safe direction.
Last month, the annual Planetary Defense Conference took place, this time in Flagstaff, Arizona (down the road from Meteor Crater). If you are interested in this topic, you really should take a look at the incredible video archive which has ALL of the presentations -- like 23 hours of them. Seriously, if you really want to dive deep into this subject, imagine me GRABBING YOUR SHOULDERS AND SHAKING YOU and saying loudly right into your face "watch these videos!"
Here is the conference webpage:
http://www.iaaconferences.org/pdc2013/
And here is the program, useful for navigating the video archive below:
http://iaaweb.org/iaa/Scientific%20Activity/pdc2013program.pdf
But you really want to go to the videos. Here is the complete archive:
http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/folder
Particularly germane to the discussion here, check out this video which includes two presentations:
http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/video?clipId=pla_48629586-65d2-44c3-a1f3-57c0c259d526
At the 1h21m point:
Overview of Collisional-Threat Mitigation Activities at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Paul Miller
(very dry delivery, but very interesting review of nuclear weapon solutions)
At the 1h42m40s point:
GPU Accelerated 3-D Modeling and Simulation of a Blended Kinetic Impact and Nuclear Subsurface Explosion
Brian Kaplinger
(new PhD, on the same team as Dr. Wie, the author mention in the post that leads this thread).
These guys have thought about these problems far harder than you have. You might benefit from listening to them for 20 minutes.
Or, you know, just skip this and resume your underinformed opinionating :)
One simple rule for its versus it's
It's this thing called physics and specifically, astrophysics. You break these roids up into smaller pieces. The gravity of nearby planets and the sun would have a far more drastic effect on the smaller pieces as well as the energy from the explosion modifying the trajectory of the pieces.
Gravity accelerates a massive object at the same rate as smaller objects. You're second point though is valid. The explosion may modify the trajectory of enough of the pieces to avoid the full kinetic energy of the asteroid being unleashed on Earth.
You mean the same way those coronal ejections do?
I realize asteroids are much more numerous in the inner solar system, but we're getting better at tracking them so we would ideally have a longer lead time to deal with any threat. Comets, on the other hand, tend to come out of nowhere, so the short notice scenario is much more likely.
...two medium sized asteroids, we need a plan to the 4 small asteroids.
Let me guess you saw 'Nuke' and 'Asteroid' and then couldn't wait to pick your knuckles up from the floor and then pound your keyboard in a vain attempt to make you fell like you have shown others how smart you are, correct?
Protip: Reading the article and then posting about what is in the article will make you look even smarter.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You do know that money spent on these projects isn't actually destroyed, right? It's spent, people get paid, corporations make money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Am I the only one who finds "roids" annoying?
Saving yourself from typing "aste" isn't much of a save.
I could see abbreviating it if it was something like "fluglehoffenscnitzelzingroids", but "asteroids" isn't terribly tasking.
You have to try to extend your warp field around it to change its gravitational mass and fail. Then hope Q puts it back in the proper orbit after you save his life from a plasma creature.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Sorry, I do not think that a kinetic energy strike would form a proper sized bell-shaped 'nozzle' for the nuclear device. A better solution, expecially for iron asteroids, is to use a tactical nuke for the first strike, followed by sequential strikes by multi-megaton nukes - the larger the asteroid, the more big nukes. Just to be sure...
Nuclear explosions in space are particularly dangerous to space equipment. What if we use a nuke that doesn't explode per se with one that gets really, really hot. Either turning it into a soft blob that conventional weapons can blast apart, Or hot enough to vaporize the material (likely) iron,and create a jet to alter its orbit.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
So rather than one big chunk of space debris hitting the Earth, we instead get a bunch of smaller pieces?
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
er you know space is 3d and the? earth is moving decelerating the fragments will probably mean they miss our orbit as well ?
I love this idea of Nukes in space, after all, no shuttle has every blown up on it's way to space.
Be seeing you...
When it hits, nothing of value will be lost
I was going to refer to the volume of the atmosphere, then I changed sentence structure to talk about "depth" and thousands of cubic meters came out as thousands of kilometers of "depth".
Ah well... should have been doing something else anyway, instead of wasting time on Slashdot.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
How does one go about getting their "New Best Way" certification? And how did this trump sending up a Bruce Willis in a rocket ship and having him shove a nuke into the ground with his space-suited hands?
I'm not sure what crack they've been smoking, but it will take a fleet of these considering that this will just make a pock-mark on the asteroids that are large enough to be a threat. The force of the explosion will be lost in directions not facing the asteroid. When we see impact craters on big asteroids, they don't look like bore holes... Don't launch one and wait. Launch EVERY nuke, just in case.
You do know that money spent on these projects isn't actually destroyed, right? It's spent, people get paid, corporations make money.
Understood. My irritation is that people outside of said corporation are lead to believe that a solution is in the near future or being actively worked on when, in fact, there might be nothing of any significant value being achieved. Sure people are taking the money home, but the problem isn't being solved.
The statement I just made does not apply if they are actually working hard on finding a solution and have knowledgeable people on staff, of course.
This should also be tagged as "whatcouldgowrong"
A nuke to destroy an asteroid. MAybe a tiny one that will not do much. But a large one a nuke will turn a large meteor into a shotgun blast followed by a large meteor..
You do a series of nuke impactors to hopefully nudge it, and you need to be doing this when it's still out by mars.
And we dont have the technology to do this, so it's all just mental masturbation.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
... or maybe a hang glider?
That much elemental iron is surely valuable. Instead of throwing it away we should be giving thought to guiding it into a position of future usefulness, IE, one of the LaGrange points.
~childo
Putting things into perspective: Solar radiation power hitting the Earth: ~1.4 e17 W. That is equivalent to the kinetic energy of half a million tons of material hitting the Earth with a velocity of 20 km/s (every second).
why not use 2 nukes?
The really important thing is to
(1) not be in the short notice asteroid situation in which case we need to continue improving our detection scopes and projection computing resources. And get every historical astronomical photograph digitised thoroughly so that new discoveries can be post-discovered (identified in 50-year-old plates) if they're there. Or confirmed to not be there. (Both types of data improve estimation of orbits.) Programmes for that are already in work, so the biggest issue is funding. (2) have a back-up plan in the event that the deflection-by-nuke plan fails. Which means, having people (hundreds minimum ; thousands better) living off-planet in a locally-sustained way. That's much harder. But it's already on our species' long-term "to-do" list.Are you really going to base the survival of our species on a single-shot effort?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Why do you assume that?
Once we've got all the significant rocks in the inner solar system catalogued, so that we know where they're going to be and they are long-notice visitors. Then the remainder of potential short-notice visitors are the ones coming in at random (-ish) orientations from the Oort Cloud. And they're much, much harder to survey for. And they come in fast and hard, with little warning.
As we improve out cataloguing of the inner solar system, the remaining probability of a short-notice impactor moves increasingly towards the long-period and single-apparition comets. And, of course, the possible (though never seen), extra-solar impactor.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
"It's this thing called physics and specifically, astrophysics. ... The gravity of nearby planets and the sun would have a far more drastic effect on the smaller pieces"
Spoken like a business major.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Just last week I was listening to an audiobook by Robert Heinlein (you know - the only serious contender that Dr Asimov had for the title "the Master" in the world of science fiction ; him) where Andrew "Slipstick" Libby is introduced into the cast list ... by double-checking the results of calculations for precisely this sort of asteroid-moving explosion. They created the initial crater by physically setting a charge on the asteroid surface, then deepened it with one (or more) nukes in the crater. Same story ; same problems. But Heinlein had the excuse of not having a lot of data to work with about the internal strength and coherence of real asteroids. We're slowing our rate of finding surprises now - because we've gone from seeing examples towards having statistically worthwhile samples of data.
"Revolt in 2100" was how the audiobook was titled ; the short-story was something different though. "Misfit"?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
A nuke in the crater... sounds kinky.