HOW-TO: Asteroid -> Strategic Weapon 251
Beatlebum writes "A TEAM of British space scientists has devised a plan to nudge an asteroid out of its solar orbit and send it hurtling into the centre of a British Town. The story posted in the Electronic Telegraph describes how a few small atomic blasts could change a comet's trajectory enough to make it crash to any point on earth. The impact of even a small asteroid would make an ICBM look like a firecracker."
scary (Score:1)
Escape Velocity? (Score:1)
just an attempt at funding (Score:2)
Read books people! (Score:1)
If there is a positive effect to discovering this 'new' weapon... at least the resulting blast doesn't irradiate the counrtyside, just lots of dust, heat, and debris.
---
Don Rude - AKA - RudeDude
This is just crazy (Score:1)
Simple physics (Score:2)
Look on the bright side. India and Pakastan wouldn't be using it anytime soon on each other, unless they both want to go careening into the Indian Ocean.
Secret windows code
So get bigger asteroids at your command! (Score:4)
Re:Or possibly Char's Counterattack... (Score:2)
Remember Planet Bombs?
Re:Good plan??? Perhaps. . . (Score:2)
Big ol splash. Could possibly give Bath a Bath.
Re:When fearmongering doesn't work... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting, but odd choice of purpose. (Score:2)
Re:We're ignoring (Score:1)
Asteroid rotate around their center of mass. Even if your asteroid wasn't rotating asteroids have very densities, so you anyone who took first year calculus can find the center of mass of an asteroid of known shape.
Watching B5 (Score:4)
Re:We're ignoring (Score:2)
The only real problem would be if the asteroid turned out not to be solid enough to deflect in one piece.
Re:Useless as a weapon (Score:5)
In their simulations an average of 15 blasts was enough to hit a medium sized city.
Once the final blast is done, it could probably be nudged into a nearby ocean or something up to the last few days, but a hitherto unsuspecting opponent would probably not be able to launch a nuke beyond Earth orbit (an ICBM will not do) fast enough to do this themselves.
Budget, less than 100 billion $ for the first one, much less for subsequent ones.
New Term (Score:3)
Or possibly Char's Counterattack... (Score:2)
Speaking of B5, MS Gundam also took a big O'Neil type colony, filled it with CO2, and turned it into a superlaser. Very cool, at least when it's safely ficticious.
Jon
Targeting accuracy (Score:1)
Better than MAD (Score:2)
Think of MAD in terms of what makes people drive safely on the highways - it isn't traffic laws that prevent someone from bashing into you at 100 km/hr.
Re:Why Telford? (Score:2)
Of course, with our luck, MS will bribe all the right people and send the meteor to San Jose. Good bye Sun, most of Cisco and Intel, Linus Torvalds, and a whole bunch of other threats to Microsoft's power.
ObJectBridge [sourceforge.net] (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Re:No point (Score:2)
And it doesn't take a geologist to know that the world is flat, or a biologist to know that maggots spontaneously generate from rotting meat.
As for the former, the Castle Bravo test literally destroyed the island in question and left nothing but a huge crater in its place.
That island was somewhat smaller than North America.
-
Re:Ummmm... (Score:1)
Yes, there is a middle man that can be cut out. However, said middle man would (if the guys employing it were lucky) be completely unexpected--if its orbit isn't precisely known or monitored. (Which is one reason it's being proposed by Spaceguard: the funding aspect.)
I mean, with the shadow of MAD still looming large in the public imagination, who is going to expect a non-nuclear attack of that magnitude?
-W-
"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"
Interesting way of raising gov't interest... (Score:3)
I'm quite impressed with this work, not because it draws out a plan for using asteroids as weapons, but because it can offer a somewhat more compelling reason for governments to fund research into 'killer asteroids'.
Face it, if astronomers say that something's got a one-in-a-million chance of hitting us, or that it passes within 600,000 miles of Earth, it lacks a certain kick--it's just astronomy, and that isn't a top priority. However, if they successfully argue that the Other Guy(s) could use these things as weapons, the issue becomes one of national defense. National defense gets funded.
Of course, one has to make a good scientific case first. I'm waiting for an actual paper before deciding how plausible it actually is--though no matter what, it's still an interesting idea.
-W-
"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"
Somebody get out the clue-by-four! (Score:2)
Since current theories regarding the mass die out of the dinosaurs seem to revolve around a collision of either a comet or asteroid with the Earth, one's got to wonder if these geniuses have ever heard of the term Mutually Assured Destruction.
Geez...
(Someone please tell me that this is an April Fool's joke that someone just found underneath a pile of magazines.)
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asteroid != Nukes (Score:1)
no asteroid has tons of explosive materials in them (Ok, maybe a purely sodium asteroid would be messy hitting an ocean)
There is no explosion.
There is just a massive exchange of intertial force and many times asteroids if not on a 90 degree angle to the target will bounce or graze the target. (several grazing scars are in south america)
Yes, a direct impact of something the size of New-york would probably cause some decent damage. but a BUS sized one would not. Mir was larger than a BUS and has nuclear reactors on it. Granted it did not enter the atmosphere at 9000 times the speed of sound (and nither does most metorites)
run an impact simulation.. the "disaster" is not as bad as people make it out to be.
Re:Solve A Lot of Problems? (Score:2)
Re:Impact on everyone else? (Score:3)
All you need is a high polar orbit platform. Minor orbit correction, and a delivery vehicle detaches and starts to deccelerate. After it has deccelerated enough it launches several properly shaped tungsten charges proteced by ceramics or composite material so that they can be slammed into the ground at proper speed without burning in the atmosphere. They hit the ground preheated to melting temperature and flying at several kilometers per second.
Precise when used versus stationary targets.
Deadly.
No fallout.
Very low maintenance costs once the platform launched. The platform if it is in polar orbit can hit any place on the globe within 24 hours. 12 platforms can cover the entire globe within the requirements of a tactical strike.
Yummy...
Comet and Asteroid (Score:1)
Re:Or possibly Char's Counterattack... (Score:1)
This was also done in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, although just with rail-launched boxes of lunar rocks rather than asteroids. Still quite destructive, though.
What Tom Lehrer has to say ... (Score:1)
This song by Tom Lehrer (from THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS) seems an appropriate respose to this comment
"Who's Next"
One of the big news items of the past year concerned the fact that China, which we call 'Red China', exploded a nuclear bomb, which we called a 'device'. Then Indonesia announced that it was gonna have one soon, and proliferation became the word of the day. Here's a song about that.
First we got the bomb and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's o.k.,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way!
Who's next?
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side, I believe.
China got the bomb, but have no fears;
They can't wipe us out for at least five years!
Who's next?
Then Indonesia claimed that they
Were gonna get one any day.
South Africa wants two, that's right:
One for the black and one for the white!
Who's next?
Egypt's gonna get one, too,
Just to use on you know who.
So Israel's getting tense,
Wants one in self defense.
"The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb!
Who's next?
Luxembourg is next to go
And, who knows, maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb!
Who's next, who's next, who's next?
Who's next?
Impact on everyone else? (Score:3)
or...
"We will destroy your town with an Asteroid, unless you pay us...
ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!"
Jethro
great.... (Score:1)
we *need* weapons more powerful than a thermonuclear warhead... not until we can explode an entire planet in one shot will we be ready...
oh wait, no, we should find a way to induce supernovae, eyah, then we can destroy whol solar systems at a time! Humans shall rule the galaxy!
goddamn i hate people.
-k-
Better uses abound... (Score:1)
L2 would be nice, but even L5 would do.
Oh, and if you run across any chondrites, bring 'em along, by all means. It would make things so much easier...
Thanks -
The doc
Re:Ummmm... (Score:4)
Yeah, but think of the style points you would get...
Seeming natural... (Score:1)
Mr Holloway, who works on risk assessment at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, likened the approach to one of a bad golfer.
So an asteroid strike would make vast areas of land inaccessable for the masses? How is that like golf?
We're ignoring (Score:4)
Finding the center of mass in an arbitrary asteroid and then finding a way to nuke the precise point on it's surface isn't going to be something you can calculate easily with a computer program; you're gonna need to go to the asteroid you pick, study it for a while and THEN experiment a little with changing it's trajectory. All this before you're ready to aim it at Earth and *maybe* hit your target.
I suspect the article linked to is meant to be read as tongue-in-cheek, just like the one a few weeks ago on using asteroids to change Earth's orbit when the sun starts expanding.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Good plan??? Perhaps. . . (Score:1)
Re:Ummmm... (Score:2)
Re:Targeting accuracy (Score:2)
Mad Scientist: Sorry, France, but we've blown up Paris.
French: Oooh, that makes us sooo mad. Hmph.
Mad Scientist (blinks several times, waits)....
French: Hey, did that grove of trees we planted to signify our version of the prime meridian [slashdot.org] help you with your targeting?
Mad Scientist: Uhm, I think I hear Igor calling.
French (puffs on cigarette, drinks glass of wine, goes on with life)
Trial run? (Score:2)
Dubya announces intergalactic war! (Score:1)
Arachnoid intelligence spy ships have learned of the human's latest desctructive technologies via an internet source named "slashdot".
They have also learned that an unnamed insect on the planet was involved in a mid-air collision with a terrestrian "fly-swatter" combat unit, located in the "oval office" in the earthling city of washington
The arachnoids are demanding an apology, lest they unleash a torrent of asteroids on washington.
Although a majority of humans think this would be a good idea, President Dubba refuses to apologize, stating that the insect was "a hostile un-friendly, whose perpetration was to bug me"
The federation's minister of Retalliatory Arachnoid and Insect Death (RAID) has decalered War on Bugs.
Citizens everywhere are signing up to help defend planet.
Want to know more? [imdb.com]
adrien
All together now... (Score:2)
I can here it now...Stu-pid! Stu-pid! Stu-pid! ... You get the point.
There ain't no way in bloody freakin' hell they can target this thing with enough accuracy to make it worth their while. One innocently slipped decimal place or one graduate student intern using the wrong unit of measure and the asteroid you intended for the Presidential Palace in Baghdad lands in the Knesset.
Code commentary is like sex.
If it's good, it's VERY good.
Retaliate Against Whom? (Score:2)
Re:So the plan is... (Score:1)
Seconded! Now if only there wasn't such a lead-time I'd suggest a few other places to wipe out.
Milton Keynes. West Midlands (ALL of it). Basingstoke. Bracknell.
Come on kids, join in! It's fun to destroy towns...
Re:Stephen Baxter's Titan (Score:1)
Sadly, this was the most believable part of the entire book.
One to skip... Oh, and "Moonseed" too. "Voyage" isn't bad though (as the first in his "let's reuse existing space hardware" series which you have to admit isn't nearly as snappy a title as his previous "Xeelee Sequence" novels)
Re:Ummmm... (Score:2)
I think you're right. Also I think there's an error in the original story.
In most articles on the subject, the adjective "small" is not found anywhere near the quantifier "1 megaton"....
(megaton-class Nukes tend to be fusion hence expensive and big. "tactical" nukes which are smaller and lighter and pure fission or fission-boosted are in the 10-500 *Kilo*ton range).
Re:Ummmm... (Score:1)
When fearmongering doesn't work... (Score:2)
So some scientist tried to scare the public into diverting more funds into their pet projects. The public said, "Ho-hum. More Chicken Littles proclaiming that the sky is falling." So the scientist try a publicity stunt.
"I know what we can do, Dr. Bubba. Let's do some math that very few of the people understand that'll show how we can use nukes to alter the path of an asteroid so that it'll blow up an insignificant little town. That'll scare the bejeesus out of 'em fer sure."
"But Dr. Dufus, we don't have the technology to target asteroids. Remember, if it were that easy, we could just deflect them when they got close enough to be noticed."
"Yeah, you're right. But remember, people are DUMB. They'll never notice if we put enough equations and other mathy stuff into the presentation. Then we could do this neat graphical thing where a space shuttle has to blow up because the nukes don't do their job right."
"You're right. Let's do it, Dufus."
Nothing to see here but some scientist who aren't getting their pet projects funded trying to scare up some support.
Footfall (Score:1)
Interesting, but odd choice of purpose. (Score:2)
Any state with the technological savvy and nuclear arsenal to conduct such an activity would be able to dispose of its enemies in another fashion, and its enemies no doubt could dispose of the aggressor. (If not, then more conventional modes of attack could be used by the aggressor with greater precision, flexibility, and lower cost). Besides, the number of possible adversaries a target state would have that could conduct such a mission is very limited, so the target state would know full well who lofted a big snowball at them, and they would merely respond in kind prior to impact with whatever arsenal they had available. The only real use I can see for such a technology is to somehow coordinate it with a first-strike nuclear attack, with the big space rock knocking out hard targets such as underground command centers.
An alternative, peaceful use for such a technology would be to bring resources such as H2O to places we'd like to colonize. Slam a comet into the moon or Mars to bring water there, for example. Unlike trying to precisely control the descent of a chunk of ice onto Earth, a dicey game at best, one could instead direct the comet toward a different celestial body and have a much larger margin of error.
Re:Watching B5 (Score:1)
One of my favorite books as a child was Robert Heinlein's 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' which talks about a lunar revolution dropping simple, massive rocks on earth targets...and that book is from the 60's at least.
I'm sure readers more well-read than myself can come up with much earlier examples.
Then what about current launch strategies? (Score:3)
Wrong. It sends launch codes to the missile, and those launch codes might say "go now," but they could also tell the missile to wait minutes, hours, days, years, even indefinitely. (The last would allow a single pod to launch them in the future, instead of the multiple pods required for the first launch command.)
The rationale is to provide a "second strike" capacity - the missiles will be launched when the enemy is attempting to rebuild the military base, etc. Evem if your launch crew is all dead, those missiles will launch.
An asteroid strike would be a very compelling second-strike weapon. Silos could be destroyed, blocked, disarmed, etc. But the asteroid-tweaking mission could be launched during the initial exchange and then it's out of reach until impact.
2023? (Score:1)
Dr Holloway:
"What? The asteroid is still heading towards Telford? I though we cancelled that in 2015?? I better make a few phone calls...."
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
Re:No point (Score:3)
The amount of available nuclear bombs is still large enough to destroy the Earth ~10,000 times. A single H-Bomb can destroy whole countries and make them uninhabitable for years.
H-Bombs are evil, but this is FUD. Nuclear weapons can make areas of land inhabitable, and will dramatically affect the land for years - but the odds of a nuclear conflict that actually reduced the earth to ashes are completely improbable. Cities are the only targets that nuclear weapons effectively destroy - that, and perhaps large dams (think three gorges and the hoover dam). There's some doubt there too. There's little military strategic value in blowing up land nobody lives on, after you've wiped out all the cities.
Contrast this with a large asteroid. The resulting firestorm would burn everything on the planet that -could- burn. Humans just wouldn't be extincted, but probably everything more complicated than inscects and small rodents. There's no radiation of course (unless the asteroid was a block of uranium, which I find unlikely). Even then.
Then there's biological and chemical weapons. A genetically engineered virus, with the right incubation time, could kill us all in a couple of weeks.
Again, FUD. Biological and Chemical weapons are a particular pet peeve of mine, and my government (Canada) is no exception to the rule here - it absolutely disgusts me that people would invest time and (MY) tax dollars in developing stockpiles of nerve gas and biological weapons that serve NO defensive purpose - they're only offensive. Chemical and biological weapons are possibly some of the worst, more horrible ways to die that we've come up with, but even then, they're not going to kill us all. They'll just kill everyone in cities and urban areas, with developed nations the hardest hit.
Contrast with Mr. Asteroid - a good impact will, in one fell swoop, probably take out a continent! A whole continent! Unimaginable energies!
Ah well.. the only thing that will wake people up is a small asteroid taking out a major center (preferably American, because that's the only country with the resources to do anything). :)
Re:No point (Score:2)
Nor does it take a nuclear rocket scientist to realize that blast and radiation damage don't scale linearly with megatonnage.
Yes, Tsar Bomba was 100MT. No, even the Russians didn't make it part of their arsenal, because it cost a bloody fortune to build, and didn't do much more damage than a 25MT bomb.
With 1960s-era guidance systems, you needed large bombs to ensure that you took out the target, because you couldn't be sure your bomb would hit the target to within $BIGNUM radius.
With 2000-era guidance systems, you can hit the target, and you therefore no longer need to dump anywhere near the same amount of explosive power onto the target to take it out.
The future of warfare is precision munitions. Even for hardened targets, a penetrating warhead and a conventional load (or for soft targets, a big-ass FAE - fuel-air-explosive) can be far more effective than either a tac-nuke (multi-kiloton) or big-ass nuke (multi-megaton) device.
The target's destroyed - the fact that there's no fallout issue with precision-guided conventional munitions is just one hell of a nice fringe benefit for your troops.
Nukes kick ass. But for the most part, they're obsolete except as a deterrent. They have a place in the arsenal, but the generals - from any nation - are aware that there are almost always better (cheaper and more effective) ways of accomplishing the mission.
If you want to worry about something, fear the rogue state that builds a basement nuke, or worse, chemical/biological weapons (e.g. the possibility that foot-and-mouth disease being a possible instance of bioterrorism or asymmetrical warfare). The nuclear arsenals of the superpowers are the least of your worries.
Re:Why Telford? (Score:2)
The first man that made 'er
Was an Engineer, of course
But then a bloody asteroid
Squished Godiva's horse?
Re:Ummmm... (Score:2)
//rdj
Re:Ummmm... (Score:2)
It takes 15 1-megaton (read: SMALL) nukes to create an explosion equivalent to 15 H-bombs (read: BIIIIIIG).
Re:Asteroids Vs. Asteroids... (Score:2)
Re:Impact on everyone else? (Score:2)
neh
Asteroids Vs. Asteroids... (Score:2)
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Earth Shield (Score:2)
From the "Disperse Life [geocities.com]" pages:
(An "inforb" is an orbit occupied by informational entities. A "biorb" is an orbit occupied by biological entities.)
The first biorb [geocities.com] is likely to be around Earth growing out of the . It will grow Before growing far toward being heliocentric, the first biorb will need to begin the defense of Earth against celestial attacks.
Kinetic energy asteroidal weapons are the most likely technology to represent the greatest threat to Earth [swri.edu] as a result of the growing solar biorb. Once asteroid mining begins in earnest, as it will once life becomes heliocentric, asteroids can be redirected via carefully planned celestial mechanics. Within a matter of decades, a malicious interest could send a swarm of tiny asteroids toward Earth at speeds comparable to that of the Swift Tuttle comet [oit.net] -- a popular candidate for global disaster scenarios. Since kinetic energy goes up as the square of velocity, the important thing is to find small asteroids with the right trajectories. This would most likely be carried out on the basis of a fairly complete atlas of the trajectories of small asteroids, searching for some large number of them that could be manipulated to converge on Earth with maximum relative velocity over a fairly narrow window of time.
The most economic defense will likely be the preemptive survey, cataloging and monitoring of all celestial objects (comets as well as asteroids) large enough to survive high speed passage through Earth's atmostphere with little loss due to ablation. This means the initial prospecting for asteroidal resources will be carried out by Earth shielding entities. It is difficult to second guess the technologies that would be available for this task so far in the future, but candidate technologies are already upon us and surveys are already being done [tpgi.com.au].
Perhaps the most positive aspect of this situation is that when an asteroid is identified as a threat, it is also identified as a particularly attractive source of "fuel" for space transportation. Any asteroid that has a high velocity relative to Earth, or can be easily made to have such a velocity, and which has an orbit that can be made to come near Earth, can be used as reaction mass to navigate the inner solar system. Each time this is done, the threat represented by such asteroids diminishes. It's as though someone had discovered a way to burn nuclear fuel in jets without pollution. The bombs would get burned up due to economic demand.
Additional global threats to Earth are most likely decreased by removing technological civilization from its biosphere.
Space Mining... (Score:2)
While I'm not one of those enviro-nuts who worry about the 1 in 1e12 chance of a satellite's plutonium powercell exploding, I am somewhat leery of the science fiction premise that we'll get tons of new raw materials from the asteroid belt or moon.
The idea is simple: go to where the iron, nickle, cadmium, and other valuable minerals are, and ship them home. There's plenty of rocks up there.
The risks are high: you're guiding rocks of important sizes towards several billion sitting ducks. "Catching" the rock in Earth orbit is just a mite riskier than guiding a broken Mir into an uninhabited stretch of ocean.
Ender's Game was Atari (Score:2)
So now I know why I was raised playing "Asteroids" and "Missle Command", I was unwittingly trying out to be the "Ender" of our generation.
What you say?? (Score:2)
How are you gentlemen.
All your small English town are belong to us.
Move all 'crumpet'.
For great justice.
This parody brought to by the SBAITGFGS - Society to Beat AYB Into the Ground (For Great Justice)
Ummmm... (Score:5)
It would take 15 nuclear explosions to push a rock on to a collision course with Earth to create an explosion equivalent to 15 nuclear bombs.
Is it me or is there one big mother of a middle man that can be cut out of the equation here?
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Re:Useless as a weapon (Score:2)
Sephiroth (Score:2)
Reminds me of Rev 13 (Score:2)
Re:New Term (Score:2)
"Somebody set up us the asteroid!"
Sorry, it's just not funny enough.
Re:a good, but old idea (Score:2)
Re:Oh, THIS is nice... (Score:2)
Re:Targeting accuracy (Score:2)
Re:Why Telford? (Score:2)
Nuclear Winter (Score:3)
Just something to think about before people get too happy about this as a defensive/offensive device.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
No point (Score:2)
ABC-weapons are already pretty good at killing lots of people, and they are easy to get. Heck, even India & Pakistan got nukes. How about the Taleban? How about you? Get yours today!
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Re:No point (Score:2)
You are missing the point. I was not talking about what is probable -- a redirected asteroid hitting the Earth is not probable either. I was talking about what we can already do with current technology. And again, a single country could make 99% of the whole planet's population (of most animals as well) die from radiation by exploding a ~60 MT bomb with a coat of Cobalt in the atmosphere. The Cobalt would become radioactive Cobalt 60, and contaminate the whole planet.
And don't forget nuclear winter.
They'll just kill everyone in cities and urban areas, with developed nations the hardest hit.
They'll kill everyone in every place where people and, depending on the disease, animals come and go within the incubation time. That doesn't leave out a lot.
So in the future, using large objects from space, we may be able to, instead of killing 99% of the population, kill 100% of it, and the insects as well, in shorter time. So what? The big challenge is obviously not finding better ways to kill many people, but to prevent them from being used.
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Re:No point (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but you don't have a clue about the destructive power of modern nuclear weapons. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton bomb. It killed 100,000 people immediately and probably about the same amount through radiation. By now we're able to build bombs with 100 megatons and more (this number practically only depends on the amount of money you are willing to spend). 1 megaton = 1000 kilotons. It doesn't take a nuclear rocket scientist to know that this stuff is capable of destroying whole countries.
Note that, of course, I don't use the word "destroy" in the sense of "blowing it up into many many tiny little pieces", but in the sense of "killing all complex life". As for the former, the Castle Bravo test literally destroyed the island in question and left nothing but a huge crater in its place..
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Good plan??? (Score:2)
So they plan to wipe out Telford on on Oct 16 2023, but "The impact would be accurate to within a few hundred miles...". So it's also very well possible that they miss England alltogether? Sounds like a good, well thought out, plan to me **chuckles**.
Re:Seeming natural... (Score:2)
So an asteroid strike would make vast areas of land inaccessable for the masses? How is that like golf?
All in all, this is very much like golf - so it's a good comparison in my book! :)
Re:Good plan??? Perhaps. . . (Score:2)
So the plan is... (Score:3)
I'm sold on the concept so far. So do they want donations to help now or what?
Re:Ummmm... (Score:2)
Besides, chances are you won't have the spectroscope AND the satellite cell phone on you at the time; I always find I leave atleast one of them at home at times like that; and you'll be busy a second or two later. You'll certainly be needing speed dial
It's to large (Score:2)
All you need to do is nudge a small space rock.
This could be done with non-nuclear rockets...
An ion engine with a couple thousand pounds of fuel comes to mind. Storable, Efficent, Hard to Detect...
Remember they estimate size of the rock that caused the 1908 siberian explosion is 50 meters (1/2 a foot ball field).
Link here [psi.edu]
Doesn't take much to change the orbit of a rock that small.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Solve A Lot of Problems? (Score:2)
What would happen if you dropped a rock on Jeruselam and then got the TV hair-do evangelists to chat up the "wrath of God" angle? What would the various sects argue about then?
Sea impacts are indeed worse (Score:3)
There is a Scientific American article [sciam.com] about the relative damage wrought by land and sea asteroid impacts.
smart (Score:2)
I cant say anything more than "Why the fuck would anyone/country want/need/desire/imagine/devise/whatever a scenario to kill 10million people by dropping a fucking asteroid on them". The same logic that wants to put up ICBM missle defense grids are the same that want to spy on China are the same who want to extort apologies are the same that want to kill palestinians are the same that want to sign the FTAA are the same that want fund studies to divert asteroids into the planet - who the fuck are these people and who put them in charge?
Re:Impact on everyone else? (Score:2)
Well, this armageddon would have a very deep impact - I suspect that the hammer would carve out a nice, deep lake to add northern England.
Mind you - no radioactive fallout, and this could become a nice, wide, deep lake - several tourist resorts could pop up around it after all of the devastation etc is removed.
Fortunately it's tough enough for industrialized nations to launch rockets let alone ones that could carry the nuclear weapons required to move the asteroid. I don't forsee this as being used as a weapon right now.
But yes, people should be made aware of this danger. I'm going to paraphrase Larry Niven on this one (because I'm not sure of the exact quote):
'The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space programme.' It will serve us right if we suffer the same fate."
Sigh...
This should definitely be a manned mission (Score:2)
Asteroid Gap (Score:2)
Warfare (Score:5)
- Throw Rock
- Hit other guy with stick
- Hit other guy with sharp stick
- Shoot stick at other guy with curved stick
- Hit other guy with sharp copper stick
- Hit other guy with sharp bronze stick
- Hit other guy with sharp iron stick
- Hit other guy with sharp steel stick
- Shoot stick at other guy with REALLY BIG curved stick.
- Shoot stick at other guy with stick with trigger.
- Shoot metal rock at other guy with rock with trigger.
- Drop exploding metal rocks on other guy
- Drop unstable atomic metal rocks on other guy
- Throw rock
Wow! Isn't human progress impressive?
Life: The end and the beginning (Score:2)
Satellite exploded just when it hits the Earth atmosphere, we all die a long painful death. Then a giant asteroid hit the Earth. Million years later, giant intelligent ants (the new dominant specie on Earth) wondering if an asteroid wipe out the apemen. I am pretty sure that is what happened to the dinosaurs...
Are you thought the Russians are crazy [slashdot.org]!
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Re:Why Telford? (Score:2)
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
Why Telford? (Score:5)
Telford is on my doorstep, anyhow - so there won't be much left of me
New Slashdot poll:
Best place to plant an Asteroid:
1...Los Angeles
2...Seattle
3...Melbourne
4...Coventry
5...CowboyNeal
Re:Ummmm... (Score:3)
Firstly, depending on the size of the rock in question a fairly substantial blast could be generated. A 60 mile radius of total desctuction is quite substantial, probably well in excess the most sophisticated "city buster" weapons still deployed today.
As to the concept of radiation, yes and no. Most of the "fall out" you hear about when nukes are involved is dirt and debree kicked up by the blast that small bits of fissile material have attached themselves to. This is why air burst explosions are typicaly cleaner than ground burst explosions. A space based blast would have very little in the way of fallout simply because of the very low escape velocity of such an asteroid. Most of the dust would just go casualy wizzing about space. The rock itself would have radioactivity not significantly in excess of background radioactivity
It's a piddling point, but your average 1 megaton nuke is probably a plutonium implosion device with a tritium fusion booster core. The "small" atomic bombs droped on Japan in 1945 were very fission inefficient, thus accounting for their yeilds (both less than 20 kilotons).
A FAQ on Nukes and other such toys is available HERE [fas.org]
Normaly I'd direct you to the NUKEOTRON to play with burst effects, but that's down, so wander around WOMD [womd.com] (Weapons of Mass Destruction) for a more interactive tour
This has been another useless post from....
Re:Useless as a weapon (Score:2)
Re:No point (Score:2)
Re:Ummmm... (Score:2)
Useless as a weapon (Score:3)
Firstly it will take months to devise "fire solution" which is useless in terms of a hairtrigger engagement. The element of surprise is completely lost when your craft take of to rendevous with the asteroid, and all it would take to shut down your plan is a quick nuclear strike by the opposing side. Thirdly the path of your asteroid has to be so precise if you want it to hit an exact target at an exact time, and you won't get that kind of accuracy with nuclear blasts. All in all it makes a pretty poor weapon
An interesting article (Score:3)
let's work out the sums:
Impact speed : 11km/s (minimum) - escape velocity.
15 small nuclear bombs, let's say 20MT yield this gives 300MT.
1MTonne TNT=4.5x10^15 Joules IIRC.
Hence a yield of about 10^18 Joules.
Taking KE=0.5*m*v^2
This gives m = 2*KE/v^2
m= 2*10^18/(11000)^2 = 10^10kg (approx)
Using a density of about 10^4 kg/m^3, Volume is about 10^6m^3.
This means that we're talking about an asteroid of diameter 100 metres here. That's getting a bit big to be an unknown asteroid (subject, of course, to any stupidness on my part, and the usual rounding errors). This is not an infeasible size for the application though - we track a very small proportion of these objects.
However, a smaller asteroid (which are more likely not to be tracked) would still cause pretty major devastation.
The problem for any would be despots would, of course, be making an undetected launch to deflect the asteroid, rather than deflecting the thing. Also there's the problem of deflecting the object in a controlled way (the method given sounds a little hard to fine tune).
For a related weapon (this time rocks fired from the moon), read 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' by Heinlein. (Amazon.com [amazon.com]/Amazon.co.uk [amazon.co.uk])
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Murky