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Asteroid Day On June 30 Aims To Raise Awareness of Collision Risks
benonemusic writes: International organizers--including Queen's Brian May, an astrophysicist--have organized the world's first Asteroid Day on June 30, as a means to raise awareness for future collision risks and encourage actions to minimize the threats from such events. "If we can track the trajectories of asteroids and monitor their movement in our solar system, then we can know if they are on a path to impact Earth," former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart told the organizers of Asteroid Day in a statement. "If we find them early enough, we can move them out of Earth's orbit, thus preventing any kind of major natural disaster."
Scott Manley: If You Could See All The Asteroids, What Would The Sky Look Like?. It's interesting to see the few that are out of the ecliptic plane.
Humanity will perish squabbling over who pays and who is responsible and and the cheapest contractor will keep reporting additional delays because the bean-counters there noticed that they will not actually have to deliver anything if they miss the deadline.
Whenever I see such discussions, I get the very strong impression that as a group humanity does not deserve to survive. Swarm-stupidity at work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The awareness they are raising is that they want to waste our tax dollars on Yet Another Irrational Fear.
If they *really* care about saving the Earth from civilization-killer asteroids, lobby for the funding of Much Bigger Rockets.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yes. Our assessment of risk, as a species, utterly sucks balls. We obsess over terrorism and child car seats. We are unconcerned about heart disease even though that will always kill a thousand times more people yearly. Similar with AGW and asteroids. Too vague, too remote, don't care.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
or steer a black hole in front them
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
so how much success have you had?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I mean, it's very likely to be more productive than what you are going to do this week to better the habitat.
Sigh... slackers with barely the energy to complain.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It is not only possible, but the easiest option, to "blow them up Armageddon style" (minus the drilling and the like). There's a lot of simulation work going on right now and the results have been consistently encouraging that even a small nuclear weapon could obliterate quite a large asteroid into little fragments that won't re-coalesce, while simultaneously kicking them out of their current orbit. A few years ago they were just doing 2d calcs, now they've gotten full 3d runs.
Think for a second about what nuclear weapons can do on Earth. Here's the crater of a 100kt nuclear weapon test. It's 100 meters deep and 320 meters wide. You could nearly fit a sizeable asteroid like Itokawa inside the hole. And that thing had Earth's intense gravity field working against it and was only 1/10th the size of weapons being considered here. In space you don't need to "blast out" debris with great force like on Earth, you merely need to give it a fractional meter-per-second kick and it's no longer gravitationally bound. And the ability of a nuclear shockwave to shatter rock is almost unthinkably powerful - just ignoring that many if not most asteroids are rubble piles and thus come already pre-shattered. Look at the "rubble chimneys" kicked up by even small nuclear blasts several kilometers underground (in rock compressed by Earth's gravity). Or the size of the underground cavity created by the wimpy 3kT Gnome blast - 28000 cubic meters. Just ignoring that it had to do that, again, working against Earth's compression deep underground, if you scale that up to a 1MT warhead the cavity would be the size of Itokawa itself.
You of course don't have to destroy an asteroid if you don't want to - nuclear weapons can also gently kick them off their path. Again, you're depositing energy in the form of X-rays into the surface of the asteroid on one side. If it's a tremendous amount of energy, you create a powerful shattering shockwave moving throughout the body of the asteroid. If it's lesser, however, you're simply creating a broad planar gas/plasma/dust jet across the asteroid, turning that whole side into one gigantic thruster that will keep pushing and kicking off matter until it cools down.
The last detail is that nuclear weapons are just so simple of a solution. There's no elaborate spacecraft design and testing program needed - you have an already extant, already-built device which is designed to endure launch G-forces / vibrations and tolerate the vacuum of space, and you simply need to get it "near" your target - the sort of navigation that pretty much every space mission we've launched in the past several decades has managed. In terms of mission design simplicity, pretty much nothing except kinetic impactors (which are far less powerful) comes close, and even then it's a tossup. Assuming roughly linear scaling with the simulations done thusfar, with enough advance warning, even a Chicxulub-scale impactor could be deflected / destroyed with a Tsar Bomba-sized device with a uranium tamper. Even though it was not designed to be light for space operations, its 27-tonne weight could be launched to LEO by a single Delta-IV Heavy and hauled off to intercept by a second launch vehicle.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Do you really want your asteroid behind a bookshelf?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Don't let this confuse you. It's just Bruce Willis is growing old.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Every now and again, we read about some average Joe who discovers a new object. If I could cough up $300 and have my computer watch my telescope every night, all night, and compare objects to known objects, I'd do it. If there were 1,000 systems throughout the US, 10,000 throughout the world with cheap $300 telescopes, I would think there would be some progress toward making sure big objects were seen.
I understand that big, fancy telescopes with top of the line imaging is where all the deep space science is done, and I know that cheap $300 telescopes won't see any new planets, stars or exoplanets. I'm just thinking that a distributed network wouldn't have cloudy nights and could classify the night sky in near real time.
useless "Hallmark" "holiday".
Or is it you with the political agenda?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
He's been a ghost all along, silly.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I'm sure there's a Punch Line in there.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I find this an interesting statement. Running the numbers, I find that you'd have to be using a rocket burning something rather better than H2/O2 (we're talking Isp >500 just to reach escape speed, much less to reach the target rock) to allow two launches of a delta-IV heavy.
And this entirely ignores that noone actually has a Tsar Bomba sized nuke available to be detonated.
Oh, and you didn't allow for a backup - if your delta-IV heavy blows up on launch (no it won't be a nuclear explosion, much less a tsar bomba sized nuclear explosion), getting another Tsar Bomba put together with a launch vehicle in your now shorter window (and it'll require more deltaV, since you'd presumably do your first launch attempt at the point that minimizes deltaV requirements)...
In other words, it'll be a bit more difficult than two delta-IV heavy launches, even if things go perfectly. If they don't it'll be a lot more than two...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Why? If there's an impact, or risk thereof, there's not a goddamn thing I can do about it. Why waste my time and energy worrying about such things?
sig: sauer
Huh?
The fact that a Delta-IV Heavy has a LEO payload of over 27 tonnes is a fact. You don't need to "run the numbers". As for the kick stage, I didn't specify a propulsion system - for all we care (since we haven't established a timeframe), it could be an ion drive and not even take a rocket so large as a Delta IV-Heavy.
Meanwhile, the Falcon Heavy is to make its first launch this year, with double the payload of a Delta IV-Heavy. And as was mentioned, the Tsar Bomba was not optimized to be as lightweight as possible.
It's almost as if I didn't add "with enough advance warning" for that scenario and leave what "enough advance warning" is unspecified. But if there's another rock the size of the Chicxulub impactor out there and we don't see it until the last second, we deserve to get hit - we're no longer talking about a 50 meter spec (Tunguska-sized), rather a rock with a cross section 30% bigger than the island of Manhattan. We're talking about an impact of a scale that happens once every hundred million years or so.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Funny how I can be almost certain that you're an American by politicising this scientific issue. Everybody else in the world accepts the science, you don't, because you don't like it. Yeah, childish as fuck, but what can you do. That dark hippy conspiracy sure is pervasive eh? lol
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Now just one minute: us superannuated hippies understand global warming being human-caused. It's the antihippie, fascist Christian/petrochemical industry folks who are paying for it to be denied....
mark
In general, yes, we can. If we see it passing, and compute the orbit to be next time or so around the sun, there's a lot we can do. If we see it enough time in advance, NO, BRUCE WILLIS IS AN IDIOT. You want to hit it so that it *doesn't* break up, but nudge it faster or slower in its orbit, and it misses by a lot (and I'm considering beyond the moon's orbit plenty).
If, on the other hand, you're in the US, and think the Invisible Hand of the Market (tm) will create a company with zero possibility of return, other than perhaps one shot to try to knock one out of collision course, you might as well be figuring on the FSM moving it.
mark
Revelation 8:10-11English Standard Version (ESV) 10 The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. 11 The name of the star is Wormwood.[a] A third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.
Actually, it makes good sense to not worry much about asteroids - almost all of those that could cause extinction (1 km or greater) have already been detected.
What's all this fuss I hear about Killer Asterisks? Asterisks just sit there on a piece of paper like a tiny little bird doo-doo. What harm can they possibly cause?
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
So, it's been thousands and thousands and thousands of years since the last asteroid strike of any consequence, and there's currently zero no reason to believe that another one is coming any time soon.
And we have diseases, and earthquakes, and deserts, and insufficient water, and insufficient food, and terrible economies, and wars, and we work way too much. But let's start spending money and time on risks we know nothing about.
I'm in full support of spending money and time to research the risks, but not to solve the unknown problem. Let me know when you know what the problem is. For all you know, asteroids are intentionally and maliciously guided by aliens. Let me know when you find out.
I did not see that coming.
It went right over my head.
It came right out of the blue.
OK, I'll stop now. (But only because I ran out.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.