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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.'"
But if we fired off two or three hundred nukes we can claim those as part of the disarming campaign, test them in live fire conditions, increase the exposure of space travel to people, and watch a bunch of real big light shows.
that is like 5 wins.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
1998 QE2 will be about 3 Million miles away. I think we're pretty safe, no Nukes needed. =)
Wouldn't that make for a good test case though? I'd hope our first attempt at deflecting an asteroid isn't our one shot at survival. With it being so far away you could do a test on it and gather some valuable data.
I still prefer the odds on the broken up asteroid than the guaranteed end of human life full asteroid.
In addition it could be that many of the pieces will miss us anyway. The relative speed of the asteroid to earth could be as high as 70km/s, so if we hit it with 24 hours to go, that's 86400 seconds for each piece to shear away from us from a distance of 6 million km. We only need to change the asteroid piece trajectory slightly to make it miss the Earth entirely. Indeed it may be prudent to have a second warhead to explode after the first one to give the pieces more momentum away from the line of impact (we'd need around 100m/s, that's a lot of momentum to be giving to potentially massive lumps of rocky iron).