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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?
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.
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.
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.
So instead on on object hitting the earth, we'll have many fragments that are radioactive,!
Nukes can be designed to have a lot of residue, or not a lot of residue. I'll take mildly radioactive rocks than a wiped out city.
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.
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.
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.
Really?
I beg of you, try going through science fiction dating all the way back to Jules Verne. Space rockets? Submarines? He 'invented' those in his books. More recently, Star Trek's communicators? You've got those in the shape of cell phones.
Science isn't clueless when it imitates Hollywood or any other kind of fiction. It is inspired by it.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
You say that like it's a bad thing....
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.
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
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
Not really.
They deal with the same problem, so sometime they seem similar. Of course, people ignore the misses(majority of sci-fi) and the details.
How do you move underwater? why you create a sealed boat the goes underwater. a 'Sub' marine, if you will. A concept far older the Jules Vern. ;also older the Verne. The shape of his fiction device was slightly different then previous ideas. We where in the age of science, so he made it science. 3000 years early it might just as well been God dust.
Going into space?
How to do create a walkie talkie that can also fit in you'r pocket? you have it fold in half. Do you think the communicate was the first devices to fold enough to fit someplace?
The communicate is not a cell phone, never acted like a cell phone, doesn't have the capabilities of a cell phone, but lets say they invented it. sheesh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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