Asteroid Day On June 30 Aims To Raise Awareness of Collision Risks 76
benonemusic writes: International organizers--including Queen's Brian May, an astrophysicist--have organized the world's first Asteroid Day on June 30, as a means to raise awareness for future collision risks and encourage actions to minimize the threats from such events. "If we can track the trajectories of asteroids and monitor their movement in our solar system, then we can know if they are on a path to impact Earth," former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart told the organizers of Asteroid Day in a statement. "If we find them early enough, we can move them out of Earth's orbit, thus preventing any kind of major natural disaster."
Re:Oh please. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now just one minute: us superannuated hippies understand global warming being human-caused. It's the antihippie, fascist Christian/petrochemical industry folks who are paying for it to be denied....
mark
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Actually, it makes good sense to not worry much about asteroids - almost all of those that could cause extinction (1 km or greater) have already been detected [newscientist.com].
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Do you really want your asteroid behind a bookshelf?
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It is [popsci.com] not only possible, but the easiest option, to "blow them up Armageddon style" (minus the drilling and the like). There's a lot of simulation work going on right now and the results have been consistently encouraging that even a small nuclear weapon could obliterate quite a large asteroid into little fragments that won't re-coalesce, while simultaneously kicking them out of their current orbit. A few years ago they were just doing 2d calcs, now they've gotten full 3d runs.
Think for a second about what
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I find this an interesting statement. Running the numbers, I find that you'd have to be using a rocket burning something rather better than H2/O2 (we're talking Isp >500 just to reach escape speed, much less to reach the target rock) to allow two launches of a delta-IV heavy.
And this entirely ignores that noone actually has a Tsar Bomba sized nuke available to be detonated.
Oh
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Huh?
The fact that a Delta-IV Heavy has a LEO payload of over 27 tonnes is a fact. You don't need to "run the numbers". As for the kick stage, I didn't specify a propulsion system - for all we care (since we haven't established a time
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In general, yes, we can. If we see it passing, and compute the orbit to be next time or so around the sun, there's a lot we can do. If we see it enough time in advance, NO, BRUCE WILLIS IS AN IDIOT. You want to hit it so that it *doesn't* break up, but nudge it faster or slower in its orbit, and it misses by a lot (and I'm considering beyond the moon's orbit plenty).
If, on the other hand, you're in the US, and think the Invisible Hand of the Market (tm) will create a company with zero possibility of return,
360 Video of all the known asteroids (Score:5, Interesting)
Scott Manley: If You Could See All The Asteroids, What Would The Sky Look Like? [youtube.com]. It's interesting to see the few that are out of the ecliptic plane.
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Kerbal Space Program.
(I mean, how hard can it be to enter a few random elements into the game and play "Nuke The Rock" in a sandbox?)
((Asked then answered: it is bloody hard considering the physics of the game means that any given offrails object is under precisely one sphere of influence at any given moment, which means that until the SOI changes (from the Sun to Kerbin, for instance) you know where the rock is and where it's going - but the second the SOI changes, all those napkin calculations you just di
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Well, the math gets really hairy otherwise once you have more than two
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nbody physics is a piece of piss. It only gets complicated when you stop talking about point sources and (as you get in KSP) differential tidal forces acting on each different component of the craft depending on its position relative to every other body and to the parts it's attached to. KSP solves this by cheating it: local physics limit is 2.5km radius from observer and tidal stresses are cancelled by assuming that what gravitational influence acts on one end of the craft is precisely equal to the influen
If there ever is a real collision risk... (Score:2)
Humanity will perish squabbling over who pays and who is responsible and and the cheapest contractor will keep reporting additional delays because the bean-counters there noticed that they will not actually have to deliver anything if they miss the deadline.
Whenever I see such discussions, I get the very strong impression that as a group humanity does not deserve to survive. Swarm-stupidity at work.
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Exactly.
It will be known among intergalactic circles as "Man's Final Fiasco". Boards and committees of useless heads will be created to 'go over the science and verify the numbers', some nut jobs will claim it's a hoax while others will get upset if the interrogated scientist wears the wrong shirt.
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"as a means to raise awareness ..." (Score:3)
The awareness they are raising is that they want to waste our tax dollars on Yet Another Irrational Fear.
If they *really* care about saving the Earth from civilization-killer asteroids, lobby for the funding of Much Bigger Rockets.
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The awareness they are raising is that they want to waste our tax dollars on Yet Another Irrational Fear.
asteroid impacts are not an irrational fear, they are an inevitability. if we do nothing to protect ourselves, an asteroid will wipe out mankind... eventually.
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asteroid impacts are not an irrational fear
I am afraid of getting hit by lightning, and getting bit by a shark, but not so afraid that I won't walk in the rain or swim in the ocean. I just take reasonable precautions.
That's the difference between a rational fear and an irrational fear.
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But what is the reasonable precaution here? You say "Much Bigger Rockets" a few posts ago but what do you do with them? Do you build them and just leave them sitting around and hope we can knock an asteroid out of the sky with one? If instead we build the capability to detect all killer asteroids 20 years out (which seems reasonable with today's technology (it will be expensive, but less so than our wars)) then we would have 10 years to build a big rocket and get it to an asteroid and give it a tiny nudge,
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Aren't we already scanning the sky for asteroids?
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Not at the level we need to be to detect all killer asteroids 20 years out. Not even close.
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Depends on what the term "killer asteroid" means. For a once-in-five-hundred-thousand-year civilization destroying asteroids larger than 1 km we have already identified all of them [jhuapl.edu]. Possible threats from this population can be projected developing centuries in the future.
For the less extreme threats in the ranges from 100 meters to 1000 meters (which covers impacts in an energy range from 100 megatons to 100,000 megatons) we do have a good way to go, but we are closing in on a 90% detection rate for the lar
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I am afraid of getting hit by lightning, and getting bit by a shark, but not so afraid that I won't walk in the rain or swim in the ocean. I just take reasonable precautions.
what reasonable precautions are we taking? with our current program, we'll be lucky to see a killer asteroid coming much less do something about it.
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what reasonable precautions are we taking?
Scanning the sky. But not building large-enough rockets.
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I just take reasonable precautions.
That's the difference between a rational fear and an irrational fear.
what reasonable precautions are we taking?
Scanning the sky. But not building large-enough rockets.
What makes you think that our current rockets aren't big enough, and what makes you think we're not currently building bigger ones?
In any event, you seem to think we're currently taking at least *one* reasonable precaution (scanning the sky). How many more precautions do we have to take before you'll no longer consider asteroid strikes to be "Yet Another Irrational Fear"? When we reach your magic number, would you then consider it appropriate to devote public money to the effort?
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You say that like it's a bad thing...
What are we going to do, build huge rockets to move Earth out of the Asteroid's way?
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asteroid impacts are not an irrational fear, they are an inevitability. if we do nothing to protect ourselves, an asteroid will wipe out mankind... eventually.
Really?
Do you have the numbers on that?
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Humanity would live through a similar impact today.
Ah, an optimist. Nothing wrong with hoping for the best, but it's foolish not to plan for the worst.
The survival of humanity is not the same as the survival of human civilization. Doing nothing may not cause human extinction, but it will certainly expose our civilization to great risk. And in this case, being prepared for the worst is a relatively low cost proposition when compared to the cost of re-building civilization from scratch.
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How do you know this, for a fact? The planet Earth could remain "lucky" for the rest of the life of the solar system.
Remain lucky? You've got to be kidding. The Earth has never been lucky. Giant space rocks have been hitting the Earth on a regular basis since it came into existence. What makes you think that will somehow magically change? Have we run out of asteroids already? The chance that the Earth will never again be hit by a large extraterrestrial body is so infinitesimal, that for all practical purposes it is zero.
So yes, it is inevitable that another giant space rock is going to fall out of the sky at some
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The awareness they are raising is that they want to waste our tax dollars on Yet Another Irrational Fear.
It became a rational fear when we began to get the technology to deal with it. If you can't do anything about it, then you just go about your business. Once you can, then it's worth worrying.
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Once you can, then it's worth worrying.
Right. And you get that capability by building Much Bigger Rockets, which is why I wrote, "lobby for the funding of Much Bigger Rockets."
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Hear Hear! (Score:2)
I mean, it's very likely to be more productive than what you are going to do this week to better the habitat.
Sigh... slackers with barely the energy to complain.
No 'awareness' necessary... FUND THIS SHIT. NOW. (Score:1)
EADP HAIV Funding campaign has only 12 days left. Only 177 people and $8,475 of $200k raised. [indiegogo.com]
C'mon please. For short notice impact threats this mission is/would be the ONLY thing on the table.
Please, just go there and read what they have to say, what the plan is. Only 12 days left.
I am so extremely fucking embarrassed for my species right now.
The take-away talking points of the threat are no duh. Grab any kid and ask 'em how the dinosaurs died, you'll probably get the right answer. Ask the kid, could it h
Distributed environment? (Score:2)
Every now and again, we read about some average Joe who discovers a new object. If I could cough up $300 and have my computer watch my telescope every night, all night, and compare objects to known objects, I'd do it. If there were 1,000 systems throughout the US, 10,000 throughout the world with cheap $300 telescopes, I would think there would be some progress toward making sure big objects were seen.
I understand that big, fancy telescopes with top of the line imaging is where all the deep space science is
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the overall reflectivity drops with the square of the asteroid's diameter
Wouldn't it increase with the square of the diameter, because that's the surface area? Mass of course increases with the cube of the diameter, so the surface area to mass ratio decreases by the power of 3/2 with the diameter. The rest of what you said sounds right, so yes, it does take a really big telescope to detect them a long way off. The "average Joe" discoveries usually happen when they are already very close - too close to do anything about them.
Yet another (Score:2)
useless "Hallmark" "holiday".
Hum (Score:2)
I'm sure there's a Punch Line [wikipedia.org] in there.
Raise awareness? (Score:2)
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We can, and should, do something about it. It's not that hard to do. It takes lots of big telescopes to detect them a long way off. If you detect them far enough out you only need to give them a small nudge to change their course enough to avoid a collision.
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I vote for the people who fund the telescopes or nukes. What I can do, personally, is vote for people who support funding programs to detect asteroids (and funding for science in general). I don't lie awake worrying about asteroid strikes, but I do try to voice my opinion for reasonable public policy.
SNL Weekend Update (Score:2)
oh good, another huge waste of money (Score:2)
So, it's been thousands and thousands and thousands of years since the last asteroid strike of any consequence, and there's currently zero no reason to believe that another one is coming any time soon.
And we have diseases, and earthquakes, and deserts, and insufficient water, and insufficient food, and terrible economies, and wars, and we work way too much. But let's start spending money and time on risks we know nothing about.
I'm in full support of spending money and time to research the risks, but not to
Yesterday was Asteroid Day? (Score:1)
I did not see that coming.
It went right over my head.
It came right out of the blue.
OK, I'll stop now. (But only because I ran out.)