A Year After Chelyabinsk, NASA Readying Asteroid Response Mission 64
An anonymous reader sends this NASA report: "One year ago, on Feb. 15, 2013, the world was witness to the dangers presented by near-Earth Objects (NEOs) when a relatively small asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere, exploding over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and releasing more energy than a large atomic bomb. ... NASA is now pursuing new partnerships and collaborations in an Asteroid Grand Challenge to accelerate NASA's existing planetary defense work, which will help find all asteroid threats to human population and know what to do about them. In parallel, NASA is developing an Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) — a first-ever mission to identify, capture and redirect an asteroid to a safe orbit of Earth's moon for future exploration by astronauts in the 2020s. ... NASA is assessing two concepts to robotically capture and redirect an asteroid mass into a stable orbit around the moon. In the first proposed concept, NASA would capture and redirect an entire very small asteroid. In the alternative concept, NASA would retrieve a large, boulder-like mass from a larger asteroid and return it to this same lunar orbit. In both cases, astronauts aboard an Orion spacecraft would then study the redirected asteroid mass in the vicinity of the moon and bring back samples."
The moon will have a moon (Score:4, Interesting)
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That hadn't occurred to me. How big a scope would you need to see it? Could you see it with the naked eye? The ISS is certainly bright, although it's nowhere near as far as the moon but much smaller than what came down in Russia.
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I just RTFA, you won't be seeing it with the naked eye or even binoculars. Still don't know how big a telescope you'll need, but they're talking boulder-sized. Probably only the most serious of hobbyists will have the equipment but I'm probably wrong about that.
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I believe it will be a small number of people who get a chance, but larger than most people would think
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Probably only see reflected light from solar panels, similar to Iridium Flares. At that distance, it's going to be pretty hard to spot with an amature scope.
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What came down in Chelyabinsk was not much bigger than an SUV. The ISS is considerably bigger and more mass than an SUV.
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Wikipedia says it was twenty meters with a mass of 12,000-13,000 metric tonnes. That's quite a bit larger than an SUV.
Finally, a mission for NASA (Score:3, Insightful)
that almost everybody can agree deserves full funding
Re:Finally, a mission for NASA (Score:4)
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The first thing that I thought of when I heard about this program was 'oh, now NASA has reason to put humans back in space again'.
I really don't see the advantage of doing this with humans. The asteroid will be close enough that communications time lag won't be too big a problem. It's not like the Orion capsule can house a real laboratory - although there is some room compared to an Apollo Command Module, it's not all that large. The Orion isn't designed to dock with anything other than the ISS - it can'
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"NASA is assessing two concepts to robotically capture and redirect an asteroid"
Robots are cheaper than robots?
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Assteroids (Score:2)
We've all been spelling it wrong, even the dictionaries, because that one in Russia last year certainly made an ass of itself. I guess in Britain the correct spelling is arseteroid.
Seriously, though, this is the kind of stuff I could only dream of as a kid. Incredibly cool!
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Soon to be a DLC for KSP (Score:2)
DLC to KSP highlighting this mission.
Should be an absolute blast....and a huge feather in the cap for an indie game companys first foray into gaming. Especially since it is still in development (kind of an alpha game with an entire community of beta testers (and one place where beta doesn't suck!) If you have an interest, it is a truly unique game and well worth th
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I got it at v0.18 and have 730+ hours since it went on Steam a month or so later. Best $17 I ever spent on gaming.
Kudos on your work to make an incredibly intricate and difficult game even harder! I love the astroids mod and as yet have not sucessfully completed a NASA analoge mission.....THANK YOU!
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cue grammer and spelling Nazis in 3...2...1...
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One of the biggest reasons for war on earth, are resources. China is running around grabbing all that they can. The best thing for the west, if not the world, is to have mutliple sources of every element in use. That is far more likely to stop future wars.
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Here I was... (Score:2)
Thinking all Americans would be given a chance to get a car cam to record such things.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
Armageddon/Deep Impact 2: NASA mission accidentally brings killer asteroid into collision course with earth. Or maybe a documentary on how NASA is using asteroid winter to cancel out global warming. Carefully done, we can kill only a few million poor folks every once in a while to preserve our precious beach front property.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
They're talking about something the size of a boulder according to TFA. Earth gets hit by objects this size all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Frequency_of_large_meteoroid_collisions_with_Earth
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TFA? You obviously missed my sig. :)
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)
A boulder-sized asteroid won't hurt anyone. The one in Russia was heavier than the Eiffel Tower. You don't think the scientists at NASA have considered this??
Response time (Score:2)
Only a year after Chelyabinsk
but 65 million years after chicxulub
NASA will pick the easy targets (Score:2)
Donald Rumsfeld called the most difficult problems requiring dealing with the unknown, unknowns.
When you have an asteroid you detect with a long approach or known orbit, you have a manageable task in understanding what you can do.
When an asteroid approaches from the Earth's blind spot obscured by the Sun, we may have only weeks or months and there may be no way to exert enough energy quickly enough to modify its trajectory.
They refer to these situations as "extinction events" for a very good reason.
... and the easy targets are not a real threat (Score:1)
The asteroids that pose a threat will fall into two classes: those already in solar orbit and those that come from outside the influence of the Sun. The ones orbiting the Sun have had billions of years to impact the earth (and other planets), and thus the probability of a harmful event is so close to zero that it isn't worth bothering about. Those coming from outside will not be seen until they are too close to the Earth to change their path. They'll look like a dim and brightening star, not really moving a
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Most asteroids large enough to cause an "extinction event" have been found and future orbits calculated for hundreds of years.
What might hit are smaller asteroids and long period comets. There is almost nothing we could do with a large long period comet. While we might get several years of warning, there is almost nothing that could be done.
Smaller asteroids we would get no warning on most of the time. There is a lot of sky, and only a tiny fraction of it is searched by something big enough to see a "city k
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Even if we knew "all the asteroid obits", there is a fatal flaw in assuming that means we can define all potential impacts.
Gravity and collisions in the outer solar system "belts" can suddenly change the orbit of a large asteroid.
Just another of the unknown unknowns.
Maybe (Score:2)
Its based on the SLS launcher and Orion vehicle - but political troubled projects. The mission seems technologically possible, but would likely be expensive and seems much larger and more complex than anything NASA has done recently.
I hope they do it - but I'm very skeptical that we have the political will for such a project.
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Probably the biggest issues will be:
1) moving the asteroid whic
Historic problems with newer generations.... (Score:2)
I don't think the younger ones can appreciate just how fast tech is happening.(just as our generation did not)
To put it into a different perspective:
Sputnik had not even reached voting age(USA) when we landed on the moon...using tech based on 25 year old tech(NAZI V-2 rockets)
About the only thing I'd like to add to your list is:
3) development of better radiation shielding for both spacecraft and spacesuits.
4) coming up with ways to counteract physiological damage from long term micro-gravity exposure.
(I rea
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#3 and 4 are accurate for LONG-term missions. For one that will last less than 1 month, they are not that important compared to the original 1 and 2. BUT, there is little doubt that those are up high on our needs for long-term needs.
And yeah, I recall watching those original star treks. Not in re-runs, but original shows. With my dad, who flew B-47s at the time.
Note the date (Score:2)
"...capture and redirect an asteroid to a safe orbit of Earth's moon for future exploration by astronauts in the 2020s." Note that it's already 2014. At this point, we couldn't get a box kite in the air in six to fifteen years, let alone a mission like this. No budget, no sense of urgency, and no time to divvy up the contracts amongst the congressional districts.
Hey... (Score:1)
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Since when is 1/2 megaton large for an atomic bomb?
A 500 kiloton purely atomic device IS rather large.. Remember, the ones dropped on Japan were only about 20 kilotons.
Now, a thermonuclear device that was only 500KT would be quite small.
My hope with this asteroid capture plan is that, if there's a serious mistake and the object impacts Earth, it hits square in Washington, D.C. with no warning and wipes it out.
"...And nothing of value was lost..."
Strat
Re:When they lie it sort of discredits them. (Score:4, Interesting)
500kt is large ever since people figured out how to actually *hit* anything with the darn things.
Back in the 50ies and 60ies you could easily be off by a mile and they'd still call it a bullseye. A few miles off wasn't unusual at all. That's not because they thought this is good, but because they knew it was the best they could do. Thus, in order to destroy a target you can't hit, you had to get a much bigger bomb in the general vicinity of your target. Because you didn't expect to be hit directly, people started building bunkered silos for their bombs and rockets. In order to destroy those, even if you couldn't expect to hit them, you needed even bigger bombs.
The better the targeting, the smaller the bombs became. Then bunker busters were developed that could not only hit a target the size of a few hundred meters size, they could also bury themselves in the ground by some 50m and explode there, with much greater effect in terms of shock waves. These days, a few 100kt is all you need to destroy anything you want.
In fact, for the most part, you don't need any nuclear weapons to destroy most things out there. Simply because of the accuracy of modern weaponry. Part of this is GPS, but since this is likely the first thing to be destroyed in a big war, people developed inertial guidance and other navigation systems that can do without it. Hence, 500kt is a big bomb these days and people are unlikely to build bigger ones for the foreseeable future. If only because it is much more effective hit several targets with a couple of warheads than just one or two with a big one.
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Nukes still have a role as big bunker busters, ship killers / sub, and deterrent.
That last one is the only one that requires big nukes. The best deterrent isn't "we will defeat you" it's "we will wipe you out".
For that, you need city-killer nukes to kill the "civilian" population.
*in quotes, because the line is blurred now.
NASA NASA NASA (Score:1)
How often sci-fi predicts the future?... (Score:2)
That explains why a lot of sci-fi has China and Russia as the two primary 'Space Powers', and the US on the sidelines.
When it comes to the whole 'space' thing, the Russians have always had the balls to stick to what was practical, and then 'just do it', while we seem to have lost our balls(politically, as far as NASA budgets go) on the moon somewhere.
The Russian's 'ownership of space' happened some years back. Their only upcoming competitor seems to be China, but they are not really breathing down Russia's
ISS is SQL (Score:1)
weaponized asteroid (Score:3)
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Has anyone considered that this tech can be weaponized ?
Yes, I would say most of us(and those working on this, and others) have thought about this, discarded that as unjustified FUD, and moved on.
It's not like we don't have experience with the destructive potential of nukes, or the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. No, of course not!
[sarcasm]
Too many players have the ability and means to do the same things, or to spot this happening for this to be a valid concern.
No one wants to open your 'Pandora Box'...we can all see where it leads. It is truly one of
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and releasing more energy than a large atomic bomb (Score:2)
"and releasing more energy than a large atomic bomb" in the first reports it was "a small atomic bomb".