New Best Way To Nuke a Short-Notice Asteroid 311
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.'"
Simulate or it didn't happen! You know what I mean (Score:3, Interesting)
"The goal would be to fragment the asteroid into many pieces, which would then disperse along separate trajectories."
Uhhh. Ok.
"Wie believes that up to 99 percent or more of the asteroid pieces could end up missing the Earth, greatly limiting the impact on the planet."
Hell of a bet to take on a hunch. Where are the simulation runs or is this a touchy-feely? How do you know it won't vapourize a nice big hole inside like the underground nuclear tests?
"Of those that do reach our world, many would burn up in the atmosphere and pose no threat."
More ifs.
Sounds kind of flaky but he's got a $100K grant which I hope will answer these and good they are looking at *something*. I don't want to be an exhibit in a future sentient cockroach museum.
Re:Spin spin.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure aiming would be a huge problem, computers are pretty good at that sort of thing. You'd probably have to have the two payloads on slightly different trajectories (one coming in from a bit of an angle) following separation to account for the 'roid's rotation.Imagine the asteroid at the centre of a clock face. First impactor would hit from a 5-to-12 direction, the nuclear warhead a few seconds later from 12 Oclock. This would require some manoeuvring after an early separation, but shouldn't be particularly difficult.
Alternatively, you could just pile the two impacts on in together from the same direction, just a few seconds (or less) apart so that there is only negligible rotation time between the two hits. Of course that risks your second payload getting hit by debris from the first impact, I don't know how much of a problem that would be. Maybe you could shield the second warhead against this, or shape the first impactor so that debris doesn't fly back up the wrong direction. Dunno. A lot would depend on how much is known of the asteroid's composition and the density of the impact site.
Finally, you could "hover" at a fixed point relative to the target, smash it with the first payload, wait for a a bit, then after one full rotation your second payload would be nicely lined up above the crater. Unless, of course, the first impact significantly changed the rotational speed / direction of the target...
Personally I like the idea of a rocket with a nuclear warhead in its belly and a great big one-shot frickin laser (chemical laser?) in the nose. Flies toward the target at high speed, then just before impact zaps a big hole in the surface, flies into the hole and detonates, kablooie!
Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sheesh... (Score:4, Interesting)
1998 QE2 will be about 3 Million miles away. I think we're pretty safe, no Nukes needed. =)
Wouldn't that make for a good test case though? I'd hope our first attempt at deflecting an asteroid isn't our one shot at survival. With it being so far away you could do a test on it and gather some valuable data.
Re:But Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
I still prefer the odds on the broken up asteroid than the guaranteed end of human life full asteroid.
In addition it could be that many of the pieces will miss us anyway. The relative speed of the asteroid to earth could be as high as 70km/s, so if we hit it with 24 hours to go, that's 86400 seconds for each piece to shear away from us from a distance of 6 million km. We only need to change the asteroid piece trajectory slightly to make it miss the Earth entirely. Indeed it may be prudent to have a second warhead to explode after the first one to give the pieces more momentum away from the line of impact (we'd need around 100m/s, that's a lot of momentum to be giving to potentially massive lumps of rocky iron).