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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!
If you have the time for it, sure.
As the article says,
A nuclear weapon is the only thing that would work against an asteroid on short notice, Wie added. Other systems designed to divert an asteroid such as tugboats, gravity tractors, solar sails and mass drivers would require 10 or 20 years of advance notice.
It's not really possible to put big rocket motors on an asteroid and push it out of the way, as transporting enough fuel to the asteroid would be unbelievably expensive and likely infeasible with current technology.
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?
Pack your bags kids! We're going to the moon!
because it's less expensive than rebuild a city?
It's not DESTROYING the incoming asteroid, it's breaking it up into smaller pieces and changing their trajectory. The point isn't to get the asteroid to miss us entirely, it's to make it not hit us all at once in one spot.
Small impacts would probably be pretty devastating for those that survive the atmosphere(think early impacts from Armageddon, etc) but at least it wouldn't cause a near-extinction of all life as a giant single impact could.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
If we're facing a potential wipe-out of several major coastal cities, I'm hoping we would get some leeway on expenses.
Probably not though. :(
I'm sure we would still be fighting over who would pay for it, or some other political bullshit when it hit and killed us all.
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.
What, you think someone smart enough to design a mission to intercept an asteroid with an impactor and hit that crater with a nuke wouldn't know to take the spin into account?
All this study was doing is working out whether the idea would work, not designing a complete mission profile for a specific asteroid.
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.
Yes, but by breaking it into smaller chunks you are increasing the surface area of the impactor. Its mass obviously stays the same, so the surface area/mass ratio changes in your favour, which means more of the asteroid will get burned up in the atmosphere before hitting the Earth's surface. Of course it depends just how many bits you can smash it into as to whether or not this will be worthwhile.
Try it with ice cubes - fill two identical ice-cream tubs with water and freeze them. Smash one into bits (you don't need a nuclear warhead for this, but if you decide to use one please post a video on youtube) and put all the bits in a tray. Put the intact ice-lump onto a second tray and leave them side-by-side in the sun. See which one completely melts away first. Same amount of water, different mass/surface area ratios.
Nonsense. You'd just use the asteroid *itself* as fuel.
That's what the nuke does. The asteroid provides fuel (as in mass), and the nuke provides the energy.
Ezekiel 23:20
I believe we're quite capable of telling the composition from remote observation and adjusting the plan accordingly. Also, some M-type asteroids (such as 16 Psyche, to name the most notorious example) do have significant quantities of iron, but I don't think that the majority of even the metallic M-type asteroids are solid iron. "High likelihood" is really an exaggeration.
Ezekiel 23:20
Actually if you break a large object into many small objects the pieces still have the same total kinetic energy.
It isn't the kinetic energy in space that's the problem. The problem is the kinetic energy at point of impact with the earth's surface.
If you spread that same energy out over hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of miles instead of one small impact crater, there is a very real qualatative difference. Not to mention the fact that the more surface area per mass an object has, the more of it will burn up in the atmosphere (further disspating the kinetic energy it had in space). Small objects tend to burn up completely.
Think about it this way: Would your property fare better in a hailstorm with thousands of pea-sized hailstones hitting your yard, or just one large hailstone with the same total mass?
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