UK Govt Plans To Set Up 'Armageddon' Centre

Scott Manley writes "According to the Sunday Times, and the BBC the UK government is putting together a task force to advise the government on Extraterrestrial hazards. Professor Mark Bailey has been campaigning for this for a long time - and it seems timely for such a thing after his staff at Armagh Observatory made the first accurate prediction of a meteor shower. "

Comments

Let me get this right...

[Cironian]

Their primary concern is whether it will hit on UK territory? I may be wrong, but as far as I know a meteor hitting earth can either be too small to detect in advance (at least without enough warning time to do anything), or - if its bigger - it doesnt matter too much whether it actually drops on the UK or somewhere else.

Anyway, it sounds like a nice job to apply for... You can blurt out all bullshit you want, and if you actually go wrong there wont be anyone left to blame you. :-)

An actual _good_ use of tax dollars

[xtal]

Finally, governments that might actually, maybe, get it :). It strikes me that this is something that the United Nations should fund, as the implications and benefits of any work into researching Near Earth Objects. JPL is associated with some work into this: Check out the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program (NEAT).

Some people think of this as a waste of money, but we are the first species to get to the point where we can prevent our own (eventual) cosmic reset button from being set.

One way to look at it is a great big life insurance program for Human Civilization - the payments aren't high, the work can be largely automated, and if the program ever pays off, there is no way to measure the value of the endeavor! :)

Too bad the US wouldn't shovel some more bucks into NEAT, but, we'll see what international competition can do.

Kudos..

Re:An actual _good_ use of tax dollars

[SEWilco]

Closely related are:

• NASA Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards
• Torino Impact Hazard Scale

It's a daft idea

[ralphclark]

With our present technology there's little we could do to deflect a projectile of sizable momentum. After all, how much money did the US spend on Star Wars? And with so little to show for it in the end.

We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.

Besides, it would be a blast.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Re:It's a daft idea

[dingbat_hp]

It scares the hell out of me.

SDI failed because (one of many reasons) several of the technologies involved, particularly X ray lasers, relied on putting extremely large power sources into orbit, which basically means nukes, and there are already treaties in place that forbid the exo-atmospheric use of nuclear weapons.

Using this meteor-smashing as an excuse to start orbiting a Death Star is just giving carte blanche to the US military-industrial complex to gear up for full blown SDI again. An international anti-meteor shield treaty would be exploited in seconds by the US.

Re:It's a daft idea

[dingbat_hp]

The treaty bans weapons of mass destruction, not nukes as such.

It's an offshoot of the atmospheric test ban treaty - anything with a prompt criticality is seen as a device and so is included.

• Reactors & RTGs - OK (although concerns about lofting radionucliides still apply)
• Bombs - Bad (even ones with "for research purposes only" on the side).
• Explosion-pumped X-ray lasers, Orion propulsion - Bad.

Your point about the OSA is mere anti-British sophistry. Anyway, that nice Mr Blair has promised us a FOIA soon and we all trust him completely. We also look forward to the day when the Labour Party's favoured candidate for Lord Mayor of London, Jeffrey Archer (BA, Oxon) is placed in a position to rule us all equally wisely.

Re:It's a daft idea

[ralphclark]

What are you on about?

Archer was a Tory candidate for Lord Mayor, not Labour. and he's out of the contest now because some dirty dealings from his past were revealed.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Lord Sainsbury on Radio 4

[Cally]

The UK Minister for Science, Lord Sainsbury (yes, Lords are still allowed in the government without being elected) was interviewed about this on BBC Radio 4's morning current affairs show 'Today'. There was a clip from Mark Bailey (describing the threat and potential solutions with admirable clairy), then the Lord Sainsbury interview.

Real Audio link to the whole (3 hour) program. The interview occurs at elapsed time 2:19:00, about 80% through the program. (I can't stand McGregor so can't bear to listen through it again ...)

It was rather embarrassing, as I recall; he was interviewed by (IMHO) the most irritatingly fluff-headed presenter on the show, Sue McGregor, who asked stupid questions, didn't listen to the answers, then asked further stupid questions which had already been dealt with ("How do you tell meteors and comets and so on to buzz off ?") The morning I hear her interviewing an Open Source personality is the morning my head explodes. (No change there, then.)

The gist of what he was saying was that the reports are way ahead of themselves; he has asked Mark Bailey et al for a list of recommended experts in the field, with the intention of investigating the actual threat and then recommending appropriate action, if any. The establishment of a permanent study group is one possibility that may come out of this process.

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Re:How much do you need to move it?

[Tau Zero]

Yes, you are correct. But that all depends on us being able to get a nuke up there, finding the correct position, and not blowing it into lots of city-crushing sized chunks when it goes off. Given NASA's recent problems with caluclating orbits, I won't say I'd be a hundred percent convinced of its success.

NASA had no problems with calculating orbits; they had a problem with unit conversions due to a supplier's use of the English system (IOW, it's all you damn Brits' fault! ;-).

If you go back a little ways in the BBC Sci/Tech material, you'll find an article about the properties of asteroids. Specifically, they are not solid; they are loose aggregates of fluff, and when something hits them they compress instead of shattering. This indicates that the likely response of an asteroid to a nearby nuclear blast would be to squash inward on the side facing the blast, absorb the kick, and fly away as an intact unit on a slightly different trajectory.
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It's a GREAT idea

[Tau Zero]

With our present technology there's little we could do to deflect a projectile of sizable momentum.

You're being much too vague. Do you want to quantify what you mean by "deflect" and "sizable momentum"? Available technology includes explosive devices yielding upwards of 20 megatons (8.4e23 ergs), and the kick you can get out of that is going to be impressive regardless. The Earth is only 6,400,000 meters radius; if you can give something a kick of 1 m/sec 6.4e6 seconds ahead (about 2.5 months), it'll have moved far enough to turn a strike into a miss. If you can apply the kick further ahead, you need less delta-V and can move even bigger objects with the same device.

We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.

Your premise, that massive equipment is required to gain protection from asteroid/comet strikes, is incorrect. Being able to loft a few high-yield thermonuclear bombs on spacecraft buses with high-impulse ion drives would probably do the trick. A few small (30 cm) orbital telescopes would multiply our asteroid- and comet-finding capabilities manifold. Manned space is desirable for a number of reasons, but asteroid defense doesn't require it.
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Re:It's a GREAT idea

[ralphclark]

You are assuming that the world would get its act together in enough time to deflect the asteroid while it was still far away. Is it your experience that governments are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the say-so of a few techies? Like, for example, Y2K? It seems much more likely that by the time the govts. were willing to acknowledge the problem the thing would be almost on top of us and quite obviously heading straight for us.

So, I'm thinking, how far in advance do we have to apply the kick? Will the politicians get their act together in time?

There are a few important figures missing from your example - the mass and velocity of the asteroid.

We'll talk about mass later.

Mean orbital velocity is about 20 km/sec for a typical asteroid out in the belt, but if one is nudged out of orbit it'll pick up velocity as it falls toward the sun from its old orbital radius of about 2AU "down" to the Earth's orbital radius at 1AU (1AU=1.5e11m).

PE=-GMm/R gives delta E = -GMm.(1/R-1/r)

and KE=mv**2/2 gives delta v = sqrt(2GM.(1/R-1/r))

Mass of the sun is 1.9e30 kg and G=6.7e-11 whatsits so the asteroid has picked up a delta v of about 30km/sec by the time it crosses the Earth's path. Total velocity therefore reaches about 50km/sec by the time it's in our neighborhood but this may vary by an order of magnitude.

OK so the energy of detonation might deliver energy of 1e17 Joules but how much of that can be imparted to the asteroid? Some will be wasted in heating the asteroid, some will be directed obliquely etc. Assume pessimistically 1e15 J (about 1% of the blast energy) is transferred to the asteroid as kinetic energy.

Now with regard to the mass of the intruder: we're only interested in sizes that would justify a deflection attempt. On the other hand if it's too big there's nothing we can do. A typical asteroid, according to my handly old Chemical Rubber Company data book, masses about 1e17 kg. The biggest are about 1e20 kg. An asteroid (too small to have a name) might massing about 10 million tonnes would be a mere speck.

To give an idea of relative scale, the Earth is about 6e24 kg.

If the asteroid does mass only 10e10 kg then imparting 10e15 J as kinetic energy will give it a lateral velocity of sqrt(2E/m) ~ 500 m/s. That's a hefty kick!

We just want it to miss the atmosphere. We don't have to worry about tidal effects since an asteroid of this size wouldn't exert a gravitational pull on the ocean anything like the moon's unless it passed by at an altitude of only a couple of hundred meters. So we have to deflect, as you said, only by the Earth's radius (6.4e6 m) by the time it crosses our orbit. At 500m/s this takes 12800 seconds. Only about three and a half hours! We're saved.

But if the asteroid masses 10e17 kg, then our 10e15 J only gives a sideways acceleration of about 0.14 m/s. You'd have to detonate 530 days before the asteroid reached us. At that time, the asteroid still has to travel thousands of millions of kilometers before it reaches us. The situation is even worse when you consider that it would take months for the warhead to reach the asteroid. So we'd need to know three to five years in advance when the asteroid is in a much less threatening orbit.

Even if Earth-based telescopes were good enough, and we had massive banks of computers tracking all the asteroids, would we even notice that far in advance, that there was a risk? If we did, how sure could we be reasonably sure that it was really going to hit us? Governments are unlikely to stump up the cash for an asteroid deflection mission if there isn't a clear and present danger.

Maybe there are many asteroids each year that get into an orbit which could possibly hit us five years later. We could hardly afford to launch missions to hit them all. IMO we just don't have the resources yet to protect us against big "planet killer" asteroids like in the movies. We need to have a network of big weapons platforms out there between us and the belt, ready to shoot down rogue asteroids immediately they wander into a clearly dangerous orbit.

Disclaimer: most of my calculations are very rough first-order approximations based on high-school physics. I am not an orbital mechanics expert. Nor, indeed, a rocket scientist ;o)

BTW, so far at least, really high-impulse ion drives exist only in the realm of science fiction. NASA's current ion drives only provide a fraction of a meter per second squared. The main advantages are simplicity, cheapness and smaller lighter craft. They won't get us to the asteroid belt in two weeks, anyway.

But a renewed interest in manned space flight would inevitably mean increased investment into propulsion research. The money needed for that isn't going to materialise out of this armageddon project, I seriously doubt enough people would take it seriously enough to put up with an increase in taxes.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Re:How much do you need to move it?

[Tau Zero]

Here's a link to the Yahoo News story about asteroid characteristics, specifically referencing Mathilde.
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You misunderstand chaos.

[Tau Zero]

But monitoring the asteroids when they are in the asteroid belt will do no good whatsoever. They are all in chaotic orbits, so current observations don't allow us to predict their future paths.

Yes we can. The property of chaotic behavior is that the long-term effect of infinitesimal perturbations grows rapidly over time. Note, long-term effect. Just because an orbit cannot be projected reliably for a million years doesn't support your conclusion. We can do a perfectly adequate job of seeing where these rocks will be over 20 years or so, and that's more than sufficient warning.
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