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.'"
Love the way... (Score:5, Funny)
Bong Wie!
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Sounds half Filipino, half Chinese. I know a few Bongs, a Cherry Pie, a Zip and a Bing.
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"and a Bing."
Is that who the Micro$oft Search engine is named after? (Or was it the guy that sang White Christmas)
how short is the notice? (Score:3)
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just... push the asteroid out of the way?
Re:how short is the notice? (Score:5, Informative)
If you have the time for it, sure.
As the article says,
A nuclear weapon is the only thing that would work against an asteroid on short notice, Wie added. Other systems designed to divert an asteroid such as tugboats, gravity tractors, solar sails and mass drivers would require 10 or 20 years of advance notice.
It's not really possible to put big rocket motors on an asteroid and push it out of the way, as transporting enough fuel to the asteroid would be unbelievably expensive and likely infeasible with current technology.
Re:how short is the notice? (Score:4, Insightful)
If we're facing a potential wipe-out of several major coastal cities, I'm hoping we would get some leeway on expenses.
Probably not though. :(
I'm sure we would still be fighting over who would pay for it, or some other political bullshit [theonion.com] when it hit and killed us all.
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Well think about how much fuel was used for the shuttle. Shuttle was around 165,000 Lbs empty; but adding in the fuel and external tanks/boosters we're looking at a whopping 4.4 Million Lbs that needs to get off the ground.
Now compare that to the Chicxulub meteorite that killed the Dinosaurs, it was 10 Km in diameter; pretty sure it'll take a bit more fuel to divert something like that.
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AH, so we will completely invent. build, launch and attach this new device in a few months, will we?
Re:how short is the notice? (Score:4, Insightful)
Once again, this is for a short-notice event. Landing is hard, it takes a lot of energy. Crashing is easy, sometimes it happens when you're trying to land. Better to plan to crash.
Re:how short is the notice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. You'd just use the asteroid *itself* as fuel.
That's what the nuke does. The asteroid provides fuel (as in mass), and the nuke provides the energy.
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Wouldn't it be more efficient to just... push the asteroid out of the way?
Actually, probably an easier and more reliable way would be to simply let a hardened nuke hit the asteroid and have it explode some 10-15 meters below the surface. We already have these (or rather, you Americans do - look up B61 Mod 11), and these are built to penetrate reinforced concrete. The majority of asteroids has a vastly softer composition. The plasma ejected from the explosion will make its own nozzle on-the-fly, so as to speak.
Re:how short is the notice? (Score:5, Informative)
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No, there is no easy way.
We can tell what is on the outside, we can tell the approximate mass, but after that...
We can't tell if it is solid. I would actually be a little surprised it was sold.
It could be a couple of small asteroids glued together with ice to make 1 large one. See Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9.
It could be a lot of gravel bonded together with a lot of ice.
If this was done close to Earth, it just might shatter and not be d
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What about when it's the size of a small city?
Re:how short is the notice? (Score:4, Insightful)
What about when it's the size of a small city?
I believe the official Protocol involves bending over and kissing your ass goodbye
But Why? (Score:3)
Any object small enough to be destroyed this way would be best avoided by evacuating the locale where it is going to hit.
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
because it's less expensive than rebuild a city?
Re:But Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's exactly what I think AI induced war will bring... Robots will just reason into the best way to end most problems on the planet would be to get rid of the humans.
(kinda like making cars a lot less safe will cut down on the number of cancer patients, etc.)
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not DESTROYING the incoming asteroid, it's breaking it up into smaller pieces and changing their trajectory. The point isn't to get the asteroid to miss us entirely, it's to make it not hit us all at once in one spot.
Small impacts would probably be pretty devastating for those that survive the atmosphere(think early impacts from Armageddon, etc) but at least it wouldn't cause a near-extinction of all life as a giant single impact could.
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Re:But Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but by breaking it into smaller chunks you are increasing the surface area of the impactor. Its mass obviously stays the same, so the surface area/mass ratio changes in your favour, which means more of the asteroid will get burned up in the atmosphere before hitting the Earth's surface. Of course it depends just how many bits you can smash it into as to whether or not this will be worthwhile.
Try it with ice cubes - fill two identical ice-cream tubs with water and freeze them. Smash one into bits (you don't need a nuclear warhead for this, but if you decide to use one please post a video on youtube) and put all the bits in a tray. Put the intact ice-lump onto a second tray and leave them side-by-side in the sun. See which one completely melts away first. Same amount of water, different mass/surface area ratios.
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1) Smaller chunks would have a slightly different trajectory so that some would miss us entirely while others, being much smaller, would burn up in the atmosphere before their kinetic energy would reach a point to harm us.
2) Exploding 1 incredibly large roid in the the lower atmosphere would have the effect you are describing, but by breaking it up, the mass of the particles entering the lower atmosphere would be drastically smaller. Thus, creating less "dust cloud".
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1) Smaller chunks would have a slightly different trajectory so that some would miss us entirely while others, being much smaller, would burn up in the atmosphere before their kinetic energy would reach a point to harm us.
You are reiterating what I had already said somewhere else in this discussion.
but by breaking it up, the mass of the particles entering the lower atmosphere would be drastically smaller.
That is true, but it really doesn't matter all that much if 1.0e9 tons hit you in the form of a few large fragments or a million small ones. The energy is still the same (you can do basic arithmetics, can you?), and, e.g., the production of toxic nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere heating wouldn't be significantly diminished, especially if all the asteroid fragment energy is expended in the atmosphere rather than in a single impa
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But it's not 1.0e9 tons hitting you in the fragmented instance. You're reasoning is that you explode the roid but all of the chunks still hit you when in reality, you would explode the roid and X chunks miss you entirely while Y chunks actually impact the atmosphere.
If you break a roid of 1.0e9 MT into 1000 smaller chunks, changing the trajectory of even 20% of the chunks such that they miss you entirely, you are reducing your impact mass by 200 million MT. That's a fairly significant number. This represent
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reading from my phone while driving
I suggest you delay any communication while driving. This may be dangerous to you and others.
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but by breaking it up, the mass of the particles entering the lower atmosphere would be drastically smaller.
That is true, but it really doesn't matter all that much if 1.0e9 tons hit you in the form of a few large fragments or a million small ones. The energy is still the same (you can do basic arithmetics, can you?), and, e.g., the production of toxic nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere heating wouldn't be significantly diminished, especially if all the asteroid fragment energy is expended in the atmosphere rather than in a single impact site. The former effect you're mentioning (as well as I did) is much more important.
Of course it matters. The energy from the Tunguska airburst is estimated to be as high as 130PJ. The largest thermonuclear detonation, the Tsar Bomba, was 210PJ. The Earth receives around 440PJ of sunlight every second of every day. Even your ten megaton asteroid traveling at 30km/s only amounts to about 9EJ, or roughly twenty seconds worth of sunlight. The energy from an asteroid impact isn't even a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. The power density is what matters, the peak amplitud
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If you have a single, large chunk, you're going to have a single large airburst
Please keep ind mind that a single large fragment is not what I had in mind. I've assumed that by exploding the nuke, the mass is already fragmented into significantly smaller pieces (around the size of the Tunguska meteoroid, or not significantly larger), and I was contrasting it with what I understood to be the "drastically smaller" pieces the GGGP was talking about, and their environmental impact compared to the Tunguska-sized pieces. A single massive ground impact is obviously going to cause entirely di
Soo... (Score:4, Informative)
That is true, but it really doesn't matter all that much if 1.0e9 tons hit you in the form of a few large fragments or a million small ones.
Firing birdshot, buckshot and slugs has exactly the same effect on the target?
You are aware that our planet is continuously peppered by space debris, amounting to something like 10000 to 1000000 tonnes per year? [tulane.edu]
Seen any nuclear winters lately as a result of all those impacts? Or those "toxic nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere heating" you're talking about?
There's an ocean of air above our heads, thousands of kilometers deep, perfectly capable of absorbing all of the impact from the smaller objects - be it kinetic or chemical.
The big objects are a problem cause they make it through those thousands of kilometers largely intact.
Just like with birdshot.
Stand far away, and it won't even scratch the target.
Fire a slug of the same mass, from the same distance and with the same load, and it will go right through the target.
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Your nuke may not be strong enough to deflect the asteroid, but it may be strong enough to increase the area over which the pieces get dispersed many times, resulting in a much lower energy per area.
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Your nuke may not be strong enough to deflect the asteroid, but it may be strong enough to increase the area over which the pieces get dispersed many times
There's a continuum between these two. And yes, I'm aware of how basic physics works.
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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 w
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Also, breaking it up dramatically increases the surface area being affected by atmospheric entry forces. More is going to burn up, and more pieces are going to break off and go away during entry.
Re:But Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess it will heavily depend on the asteroid.
Most certainly. No objection here.
Remember that a nuclear explosion is not that big. Without an atmospheric shock wave by suddenly heated air and with an asteroid not that scared about radioactivity, for many asteroids a nuclear bomb might have hardly any effect.
I'd disagree here. With a moderately underground burst, a substantial mass of the asteroid (compared to the mass of the nuke - not compared to the mass of the asteroid, of course!) gets vaporized. Please remember that this is the mode in which a nuke airburst creates a fireball: The air is heated into incandescence by an extreme flux of X-ray radiation. In solid matter, the exponential falloff of the X-rays happens over a smaller distance, but you still evaporate a lot.
If you do it on the surface or a few meters underground, you'll probably waste a lot of the energy. You'll get a lot of high temperature plasma, but the mass will be still quite low. What you should be aiming for (pun intended :-)) is a detonation depth sufficient to create a substantial mass of solid ejecta propelled by the explosion in (mostly) one direction such that their speed won't exceed some reasonble value (between 10-50 m/s?). Remember; you're aiming for maximum impulse, not for a high-speed jet. The remaining mass of the asteroid will receive the same impulse in the opposite direction.
If it has an effect it might disperse it a bit but garvity might still keep it together
The escape velocity of any small asteroid is minimal. You could jump with just your legs off of a 20km body and get lost in space just fine.
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually if you break a large object into many small objects the pieces still have the same total kinetic energy.
It isn't the kinetic energy in space that's the problem. The problem is the kinetic energy at point of impact with the earth's surface.
If you spread that same energy out over hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of miles instead of one small impact crater, there is a very real qualatative difference. Not to mention the fact that the more surface area per mass an object has, the more of it will burn up in the atmosphere (further disspating the kinetic energy it had in space). Small objects tend to burn up completely.
Think about it this way: Would your property fare better in a hailstorm with thousands of pea-sized hailstones hitting your yard, or just one large hailstone with the same total mass?
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In terms of having confidence that you'll save lives, you may be correct. In terms of property damage - it is difficult to be sure. An asteroid delivering even a glancing blow to a population center could easily cause several billion dollars of damage. I expect the whole cost of this program would be less than that.
A tough thing with small objects like this is that their trajectory
Spin spin.. (Score:4, Informative)
Don't asteroids usually spin? If you blast a crater on one side, then you have some serious aiming to do to hit the crater?
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Don't asteroids usually spin? If you blast a crater on one side, then you have some serious aiming to do to hit the crater?
Then again, clearly it's possible to hit with photon torpedoes, and using the Force.
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Re:Spin spin.. (Score:4, Funny)
It's proton torpedoes. Photon torpedoes are from Star Trek.
Haha, annoy two sets of fans at once. :)
Re:Spin spin.. (Score:4, Funny)
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Planets and moons also spin, what's your point?
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I'm sure they could space the two parts exactly one revolution apart (even taking the asteroid's relative velocity into account).
I think this is the type of problem done in high school mathematics?
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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 par
Re:Spin spin.. (Score:5, Informative)
Rocket scientists have managed to aim spacecraft to very specific points on spinning bodies before, I'm sure they'll manage.
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It's easy to hit something once. When what you're trying to hit it with is moving at a basic set speed which may not allow enough change to compensate for the spin, then it becomes more difficult. Then, you have to think of it as closing velocity.... you get one shot, and that's pretty much it. If you miss, the first impact does nothing for you. The warhead part isn't going to be able to turn around, race ahead of the object, turn back around, and hit it in that hole (or try to) again.
I reall
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Don't asteroids usually spin? If you blast a crater on one side, then you have some serious aiming to do to hit the crater?
We have to try SOMETHING, even if it's a disgustingly planned attack almost guaranteed to fail.
Don't asteroids rotate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even with a small rotation your nuclear bomb would miss the crater without some extra guidance which is not shown.
Re:Don't asteroids rotate? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you think someone smart enough to design a mission to intercept an asteroid with an impactor and hit that crater with a nuke wouldn't know to take the spin into account?
All this study was doing is working out whether the idea would work, not designing a complete mission profile for a specific asteroid.
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what's happens when your crater causing nudge furthers changes the rotation?you literally have to plan for the final rotation change after the kinetic crater impact.
much simpler send up more than one nuke. Pepper the asteroid with them one after another after another.
We have thousands why skimp. More is always better.
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If we have a 1% risk of a rocket detonating during launch there might be reason to design a mission that only sends two rather than 1000.
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What, you think someone smart enough to design a mission to intercept an asteroid with an impactor and hit that crater with a nuke wouldn't know to take the spin into account?
All this study was doing is working out whether the idea would work, not designing a complete mission profile for a specific asteroid.
You know what you're doing in your comment? It's called assuming. The parent's question is pefectly valid and deserved a damned good discussion!
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People smart enough to send a satellite into a martian orbit didn't know to convert standard to metric, so yeah, it's possible that they could overlook something in their calculations.
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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:Simulate or it didn't happen! You know what I m (Score:4, Insightful)
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What would happen is the nuke would push the fragments apart. These would continue to diverge, but would follow much the same course as the original asteroid. Whether they've been deflected enough to miss the Earth --- which is, of course, a really big target --- depends enti
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I'm no astrophysicist, but it seems to me that if you break the asteroid apart, and all the fragments still fall into Earth's atmosphere, a smaller mass of debris will strike the surface because more of it will vaporize in the atmosphere, due to greater surface area (of many fragments versus one single asteroid). Now whether that's enough to make a worthwhile difference, I dunno.
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I imagine the nuke shatters the asteroid, sending chunks flying, and Newton 2 then comes into play diverting the main body just enough to miss us.
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Sounds kind of flaky but he's got a $100K grant...
Come on, you gotta let people play with money in ways that are so slim to succeed that they'll need to ask for more to play with. It's how the aste.. err.. WORLD goes 'round.
And also, maybe he'll get to play with a nuke or at least watch during a test. Everyone wants to do it!
:-)
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Two things:
1. Doing nothing means much worse damage, if not extinction. Under those circumstances, I don't see why sending lots of nuclear ordinance would be a bad thing.
2. Fragmenting a big rock means you get smaller rocks. Smaller objects that are fragments of one bigger object will have more surface area, which will mean more protection from atmospheric forces during entry. It also means less damage due to simple F = ma physics - reduce the mass, reduce the force to any specific area. I'd much rath
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To be fair, regardless of simulations, proofs etc. having 50 asteroids of mass 1 tonne each impacting the earth at the same time is *way* less risky than having a single asteroid of 50 tonnes impact - at the very least more of the mass will be burned off in the atmosphere, also the distributed nature, and lower individual impact energies, of the fragments will almost certainly result in less loss of life and less climate change...
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A nudge I can understand if there is any way to create enough energy to push something that large out of the way, but what is the point of the nuke? How do we know this doesn't end up creating lots of smaller asteroids?
That's specifically how it works. The idea is that lots of small pieces are less damaging than the big chunk, because each little chunk can burn on its own instead of one big chunk making it to the ground. A bunch of small pieces reaching the ground do less damage than one big chunk (something the size of a house hitting the ocean is a tsunami, something the size of a city is a shockwave, and so on) so busting it up reduces the total damage by a huge amount even if total deflection isn't possible.
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?
Firstl
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For the atmosphere to be heated up by the kinetic energy in an asteroid (or a bunch of fragments of one), it'd have to be a really enormous asteroid. We've had lots of asteroid impacts in our prehistory and they didn't turn the biosphere into an oven.
Obvious answer (Score:5, Funny)
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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"Nuke it in orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
FTFY
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I fail to see how more bitcoin will help in this case.
Sad (Score:2)
Meanwhile, my alma mater's big project is going to be a pork-barreled animal disease lab within eyesight of 50,000 respiratory tracts on gamedays. Ad Astra, my ass.
As long as it is not spinning (Score:2)
Using a nuke might bot be a great idea either (Score:2)
What sort of debris would actually find its way down?
My first thought was "okay, send up hundreds or thousands of high explosive devices distributed evenly on the surface of the oncoming rock to form a giant shotgun blast to try to reduce one big thing into a whole bunch of small things which would burn up in the atmosphere.
That might only blast away the surface of the rock leaving behind a large core of the original and a lot of debris particles, but you know? Lather, rinse, repeat as needed. And of cour
Half of the solution (Score:3)
Child's Play (Score:5, Funny)
Build a triangular shaped ship and just blast the asteroids into smaller chunks, then smaller pieces and then finally destroy them altogether.
Lawrence Livermore presentation from PDC 2013 (Score:4, Informative)
Last month, the annual Planetary Defense Conference took place, this time in Flagstaff, Arizona (down the road from Meteor Crater). If you are interested in this topic, you really should take a look at the incredible video archive which has ALL of the presentations -- like 23 hours of them. Seriously, if you really want to dive deep into this subject, imagine me GRABBING YOUR SHOULDERS AND SHAKING YOU and saying loudly right into your face "watch these videos!"
Here is the conference webpage:
http://www.iaaconferences.org/pdc2013/ [iaaconferences.org]
And here is the program, useful for navigating the video archive below:
http://iaaweb.org/iaa/Scientific%20Activity/pdc2013program.pdf [iaaweb.org]
But you really want to go to the videos. Here is the complete archive:
http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/folder [livestream.com]
Particularly germane to the discussion here, check out this video which includes two presentations:
http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/video?clipId=pla_48629586-65d2-44c3-a1f3-57c0c259d526 [livestream.com]
At the 1h21m point:
Overview of Collisional-Threat Mitigation Activities at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Paul Miller
(very dry delivery, but very interesting review of nuclear weapon solutions)
At the 1h42m40s point:
GPU Accelerated 3-D Modeling and Simulation of a Blended Kinetic Impact and Nuclear Subsurface Explosion
Brian Kaplinger
(new PhD, on the same team as Dr. Wie, the author mention in the post that leads this thread).
These guys have thought about these problems far harder than you have. You might benefit from listening to them for 20 minutes.
Or, you know, just skip this and resume your underinformed opinionating :)
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1998 QE2 will be about 3 Million miles away. I think we're pretty safe, no Nukes needed. =)
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.
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So instead on on object hitting the earth, we'll have many fragments that are radioactive,!
Nukes can be designed to have a lot of residue, or not a lot of residue. I'll take mildly radioactive rocks than a wiped out city.
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Yeah right, like you'll be able to tell the effects of 1Mt of bomb in 100Mt of impact damage
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The only prediction you need to know post strike is: will it miss? After that, who gives a damn.
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It is if it goes off deep inside the thing (hence the crater and penetrating warhead). No air needed for shockwave - the material of the asteroid will do fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test) [wikipedia.org]
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All a nuclear device would do in space is heat it up, pretty rapidly, maybe enough to thermal-stress-fracture it into several pieces, but nevertheless a nuclear weapon in space is not going to blow an asteroid (or anything else) to bits.
The heat would vapourize the rock, which would at least expand and exert some force on the rest of the asteroid. If the nuke was embedded in the asteroid before exploding, the vapourised rock would expand inside the asteroid, and probably significantly fracture the asteroid, perhaps into several pieces. And those individual pieces, as well as being less mass than the combined mass before (because of the mass lost to vapourised rock) would also be on a different trajectory to before, and so perhaps missing e
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Depending on the asteroid size and composition I'd be worried that the warhead would drill through the asteroid entirely and exit out the far side. I guess you could start a watchdog timer to trigger a few ms after impact no matter what.
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All a nuclear device would do in space is heat it up, pretty rapidly, maybe enough to thermal-stress-fracture it into several pieces, but nevertheless a nuclear weapon in space is not going to blow an asteroid (or anything else) to bits.
Well, we have to play with toys and money to test that and be sure.
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Not going to matter much if the warhead is only a second or so behind.
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Really?
I beg of you, try going through science fiction dating all the way back to Jules Verne. Space rockets? Submarines? He 'invented' those in his books. More recently, Star Trek's communicators? You've got those in the shape of cell phones.
Science isn't clueless when it imitates Hollywood or any other kind of fiction. It is inspired by it.
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Not really.
They deal with the same problem, so sometime they seem similar. Of course, people ignore the misses(majority of sci-fi) and the details.
How do you move underwater? why you create a sealed boat the goes underwater. a 'Sub' marine, if you will. A concept far older the Jules Vern. ;also older the Verne. The shape of his fiction device was slightly different then previous ideas. We where in the age of science, so he made it science. 3000 years early it might just as well been God du
Going into space?
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