How To Deflect an Asteroid With Today's Technology 264
Matt_dk writes "Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart is among an international group of people championing the need for the human race to prepare for what will certainly happen one day: an asteroid threat to Earth. Schweickart said the technology is available today to send a mission to an asteroid in an attempt to move it, or change its orbit so that an asteroid that threatens to hit Earth will pass by harmlessly. But what would such a mission entail?"
It all depends on detection... (Score:5, Insightful)
The cost... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It all depends on detection... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It all depends on detection... (Score:3, Insightful)
It needs to be off-planet to see better.
Place it on the moon, in one of the 2 LaGrange points, in orbit, or where ever it makes $en$e.
Because right now we have next to nothing and this currently popular "manage by crisis" management style will do nothing to help.
The Earth would be fine (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:solutions from the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Using nukes would allow a smaller projectile, but would very likely cause radioactive debris to renter earth's atmosphere. Not good. Its better to land on it and push it into the sun's gravity well.
I thought the idea for nukes was to set the off well away from the surface so that one side of the asteroid ablates off producing a net thrust. This is preferred because it doesn't waste energy breaking a large rock into smaller pieces, doesn't create debris, and can also be effective on 'rubble pile' type asteroids.
And of course, the biggest advantage for a nuke is that it's the densest form of energy storage that we have, you can send a nuclear warhead up for way less delta-V than an equivalent amount of rocket fuel, even if the nuke is only 40% efficient in terms of energy to thrust. But then I suppose you could have an Ion type engine that uses little propellent and gathers energy from solar panels or even a nuclear reactor. Find a way to use the asteroid itself as the propellent (mass driver), use energy from the sun, and the necessary automation to gather and process the rock and you'd have a very light weight solution (with the added advantage of setting up the first, prototypical asteroid mining facility).
How to move asteroids. (Score:3, Insightful)
You find out its orbital and mechanical properties as early as possible.
Then you send a gravity tug to change the orbit.
Re:Where is the private sector here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cost of preventing impact >>> (cost of impact * probabilitiy of impact)
About once a century we get an impact that's equivalent to a few megatons, and there's a 75% chance of it hitting an ocean and about a 99% chance of not hitting a heavily populated area. Sucks if your farm happens to be ground zero, but there's no sane reason to spend billions of dollars a year trying to prevent it.
Re:The cost... (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that it's quite that dichotomy, but those "teabaggers" you ridicule aren't as stupid as you think that their politics are.
Re:Spoiler alert (Score:3, Insightful)
If you miss being non-monogamous so much, you should've stayed that way...
I miss the young more than the non-monogamous, and I didn't get a choice on that.
It's true that I do miss parts of being single at times or are nostalgic for its bright spots, but it's also true that I do overall prefer the life I've chosen to replace it with. My wife is amazing. Family life with anyone else I'd met or dated never seemed like a good idea, but this is right for me.
Re:It all depends on detection... (Score:1, Insightful)