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Deflecting an Asteroid Will Be Harder Than Scientists Thought (upi.com)
schwit1 shares a report from UPI: According to new asteroid collision models designed by scientists at Johns Hopkins University, deflecting a large rock headed for Earth will be harder than previously thought. Using the most up-to-date findings on rock fracturing, researchers developed computer models to more accurately simulate asteroid collisions. For the newest study, scientists decided to divide the model into two phases. Phase one modeled the immediate fracturing that happens in the wake of a collision -- the processes that play in a matter of seconds. The second phase simulated the gravitational re-accumulation process that happens over the course of several hours or days.
The first phase of the updated model showed a large asteroid is not destroyed by a much smaller asteroid. Instead, millions of cracks form throughout, the core fractures and a crater is left behind. During phase two, the fractured core exerts a strong gravitational pull on the smaller pieces of debris and shrapnel broken during the impact. Because the asteroid did not crack completely during phase one, the space rock retained significant strength. If scientists are going to develop an asteroid deflection strategy that can actually work, they need to know how much force it really takes to destroy or deflect one. The latest study -- published in the newest issue of the journal Icarus -- showed it's more force than was originally thought.
The first phase of the updated model showed a large asteroid is not destroyed by a much smaller asteroid. Instead, millions of cracks form throughout, the core fractures and a crater is left behind. During phase two, the fractured core exerts a strong gravitational pull on the smaller pieces of debris and shrapnel broken during the impact. Because the asteroid did not crack completely during phase one, the space rock retained significant strength. If scientists are going to develop an asteroid deflection strategy that can actually work, they need to know how much force it really takes to destroy or deflect one. The latest study -- published in the newest issue of the journal Icarus -- showed it's more force than was originally thought.
Its doable. The problem is that you won't see it coming, when it comes.
A Stars and Stripes painted object will suffice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I though all our non-sci-fi asteroid deflection strategies involved giving them a gentle push over a few weeks / months with solar sales / ion thrusters etc.
There did this playing pool in space thing come from?
I always though the goal of the blast was not to destroy the asteroid but to change its trajectory...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
It's easy!
TFA seems to be about destroying or breaking up an asteroid. Yet they keep mentioning deflecting it, i.e. altering its trajectory so it’ll miss Earth.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
If a large asteroid on a collision course with Earth is fractured, that just turns it into a bunch of little asteroids that will hit Earth.
So the Earth doesn't get shot with a 12-gauge slug, it gets blasted with birdshot. Either way, anything on the surface is completely fucked.
Isn't the goal to change the course of the asteroid?
"Deflecting" and "destroying" are two different strategies to avoid collision with an asteroid - and "destroying" has long been seen as the worse one for that matter.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/06/politics/donald-trump-democrats-congress/index.html
If an asteroid is not rotating, it makes sense that if fractured into pieces by a thermonuclear explosion, the pieces will tend to drift back together in one place.
So our strategy for an Earth-impacting asteroid should be: if it is rotating, blow it apart and watxch the pieces fly away; if it is not rotating, nudge its orbit with a series of small explosions.
I reckon $5 billion would be more than enough, and we'll get the Mexicans to pay for it.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/03/04...
Looks like the editors did not even look at it and just "aggregated" the content from some random news site that also was no capable of summarizing the hart of the matter in a subject line.
...about finding Kirk.
They just need to deflect the asteroid early enough with a small explosion that won't break it up.
But if they're going to sit around and argue about it all day, they'll never get there in time. If it happened in TOS it must be true.
C'mon guys, this isn't rocket science.
If they are assuming to be dealing with an arbitrarily formed piece of rock: we are dealing with something of dangerous size that likely has survived millions of years of random collisions, including collisions that fractured off other pieces of rock. If you model this as an arbitrary rock, you are likely underestimating its resiliency as a collision survivor.
In last resort we can always try to redirect all our active satellites to it's path and hope for the best :P
why not just try to slow it down enough maybe daisy chain nukes in it's path and detonate them causing out-gassing (like a comet would flying towards the sun does which eventually causes it to propel back out into space) slowing it down so the earth passes by
They should just ask APK for some ideas. He knows all about trying to deflect things even if it doesn't work. They might get some different ideas they could work with.
Wait, so a large space object that breaks into pieces is still affected by its internal gravity?
That's why I stopped reading Seveneves.
They should call on Rey because everyone knows she has way more force than Luke.
Assuming the asteroid isn't a lump of metal, you could harpoon it. Once harpooned, then you fired off an attached rocket to "push" it off course.
Life is not for the lazy.
Bruce Willis is still alive today, but what happens when he dies?
Nobody wants to deflect an asteroid with another one. That would be stupid. Instead of getting 10000 tons on our head in 1 piece it would just come down in several.
Landing a drive on the sucker is easier, if it far enough out there.
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Mystery Red of the Great American Eclipse
It has blood on it!
ABCNews: Eclipse makes pendulum wander
Sun researchers find strange eclipse reading
It depends on if he dies because he stays behind to make sure the bomb goes off.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
1.) sats can be guided precisely to the asteroids
2.) Nukes can generate sufficient impulse (evaporate sufficient material off the rock) to kick the rock into a slightly different course.
3.) Non-nuclear methods only work on small rocks.
4.) CIA anti-nuke-outfits who want to dearm everybody outside America need not apply.
If you can be sure the fragments are harmless of size, then shattering is just as good as keeping in one piece and changing trajectory.
Nukes can do that. Sats and telescopes can do the navigation. a piece of C code will be the detonator. All secured by crypto.
Capture in orbit around or impact it upon the Moon.
We that natural defense with significant mass and gravity.
Just look at all the craters on it, that stuff could have hit the Earth instead.
I wonder if long thin titanium rods could be used to hit the front of the asteroid and continue with digging a hole through the center. In doing that, i would think that it would produce a lot of cracking through out and after maybe 20-30 rods hitting it, a nuke in the center could cause splitting. Of course, this would need a bit of known time to get it together. IOW, if we have a week before it hits us, then this would likely not work. BUT, a month or more, it might.
Regardless, they will try different approaches on the models.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Read the crummy UPI story, and the original paper, and there is nothing in the paper or the scientist's quotes that is either about, or pertains to, deflection of asteroids, except for three sentences of the reporter bloviating about it. The reporter apparently believes, based on nothing, that asteroid deflection means "destroying the asteroid".
This paper is about how asteroids fracture and reassemble in collisions with other asteroids and thus the typical structure to be expected. It is an advance in the state of asteroid analysis, but we already expected most of them would be "rubble piles" from several lines of evidence.
Deflection is not "blowing up asteroids", and no one thinks the way to deal with an asteroid on a collision course with Earth is to "blow it up". Shattering an asteroid leaves it on the same collision course, but in many pieces which is worse since many large pieces can be expected to hit over a wide area -- turning it into an asteroid "cluster bomb:". It is the same reason that many small nuclear bombs do more damage than the same energy in one large bomb.
Deflection depends on changing the asteroid's trajectory, while leaving it in one piece. So as far as it goes, this paper says that should be easier (less chance of permanent fragmentation).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
SUBJECT: ASTEROID DEFLECTION - POTUS IMAGERY
CLASSIFY: NOFORN/REPEYESONLY
Analysts have determined that a cost effective method of asteroid deflection would be to simply paint Donald Trump's image on to an asteroid.
While counterintuitive to the casual observer, we believe this course of action will lead to an accelerated program by liberal factions within congress to approve expedited funding for an expedition to remove an incoming asteroid by any means necessary, including nuclear detonation.
While opposition to nuclear payloads have been exhibited by liberal opponents over fears of nuclear proliferation for space programs, we believe this will incite an immediate reaction that will override any prior objections and bring about a desired outcome for delivery of a nuclear device into space. Once launched, a hidden pod will be launched to deliver a 5 gallon container of white paint to a portion of the "face" that would correspond to acne, and a 5 gallon container of black paint in proximity to an "eye" that was previously painted on the asteroid, with a highly reflective metallic "Banksy" logo additionally placed therein.
The delivery of these two paint containers would result in multiple objectives:
- Photos of the resulting asteroid will increase Banksy's street cred, destabilizing art markets overseas as his work is driven to astronomical pricing levels (yes, pun intended)
- Liberal factions will direct their attention to a "greater good" message of intergalactic grafitti whereby the deflected asteroid will be advertising a more desireable message as it continues it's path throughout the solar system, with a recurring embarrassing message long after Trump's demise.
- Color and reflection disparities will cause a distortion in the planned trajectory and actually cause the asteroid to miss earth.
- A nuclear warhead is parked in space for optional use later.
- Trump will be assuaged in knowing he will be "immortalized" through the intergalactic, er trans solar-system art work.
It seems to me you have people who have hammers, who love hammers, who want to use hammers for everything, even for buttering bread.
Who should be using a net.
Distributing lower amounts of force over a longer period of time, using a net to attach to an asteroid and ion drives to slowly alter the orbit, is a far more useful method of deflection than a short sharp shock. Getting that much energy at one point for a short duration is very very expensive in orbital mechanics, especially from earth surface, whereas doing intercepts with nets and ion boosters is something you can preposition in higher orbits and then deliver to a target.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The best option is to develop better technology to detect asteroids farther away (a series of monitoring satellites covering all quadrants overlapping). Once detected other methods than brute force could be applied. I've seen ideas like using solar wind/particles to move it by making one side of the object a black body (to absorb energy - and thus apply a force), to applying force directly by 'docking' with it and using rockets to nudge it off course.
The real problem isn't how to move the asteroid, the real problem is early detection. The earlier we detect it, the less energy has to be applied to it.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The net attraction in this case is toward the centre of mass of the cluster of broken up pieces.
In other words, it would tend to re-assemble, but in fairness, that would take a long time if they were actually substantially separated.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
on trajectory estimates.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the true nature of the problem is that the further out we detect the object, the more uncertainty there would be about whether it will hit Earth or just be a close near miss.
But it needs to be detected far out to have time to plan, build, execute the intervention.
What if we spend the 100s of billions of dollars needed to do an intervention like ion engine course correction, or painting, and then find out as it gets closer that, well, it looks like it most likely was going to miss "to the left" by a small margin, but we seem to be correcting it to the right just enough to actually hit Earth. Oops!
Or we realize that it's going to miss, three quarters of the way through the 100s of billions project, and cancel it. Predictable result in human affairs: You never get the funding again, ever, even if it happens to be actually needed next time.
This is what is technically known as a conundrum.
And yes, blowing it up is beyond stupid in almost all cases. Just get more chunks hitting Earth. Even more destructive probably. That's only suitable for movie plots written, sorry to say, by artsies.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
1) That we don't mind spending a lot of money on possibly unnecessary intervention missions.
AND
2) The intervention (e.g. rotation-timed ion engine push) needs to be enough of a correction to alter the trajectory by a lot more than the error bars on the trajectory estimate. So a lot of energy will need to be delivered. The math, anyone?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Someone better tell Bruce Willis.
We have the tech, quite often Mars can recognize asteroids in our blind spot of the Sun. thoughts... ?
[($)]
One of the subjects that for the longest time ruined Nikolai Tesla's reputation was his suggestion that you could install a giant tuning fork in an asteroid to split it in two, allowing the pieces to pass around the Earth without impact.
Give us some concrete examples:
One hydrogen bomb detonated one mile from a ten mile wide asteroid at one quarter astronomical unit of distance from Earth, while the asteroid is traveling at the rate of 100 meters per second heading in the direction of Washington, DC. What effect would the impact of the bomb have on the trajectory of the asteroid, depending on the angle of impact?
Certainly an astrophysics scientist can come up with a much more realistic example than the one I just concocted for the sake of discussion.
Just print some more dollars and save the world !
Currently they do it to destroy parts of the world, so Big Progress !