Only nukes can stop planetsmash asteroids, say US boffins
Top American boffins have warned that the US government's efforts to prevent global apocalypse caused by meteor strike are inadequate. The scientists add that nuclear weapons are the only practical means of defence against large, planet-wrecker sized asteroids. In a new report, the US National Research Council says that so- …
World free of nukes does not necessarily imply space free of nukes. That is one place where they may actually prove themselves useful.
A device whose purpose is to modify the trajectory of an asteroid is not a weapon, even if it does its job using a large explosion.
Unless, perhaps, you are modifying the trajectory of the asteroid in order to bring it into a collision course with someone you don't like.
I just have this nasty feeling that an orbital nuclear strike platform is more likely to be used for a military strike than against a catastrophic piece of space debris. Comparing the number of known catastrophic space debris strikes against the number of armed conflicts in human history doesn't leave you with favourable odds....
Hmm - maybe another task for an Orion/Daedalus class engine?
If caught in time anything from a solar sail to a ion drive would do the trick, the real secret is to get lots of time to do something effective.
Therefore lets start with NEOs and work our way out (not-Near Earth Objects, err Close Earth Objects?) and ideally have some wide-field telescopes checking out anything coming into the solar system.
Hopefully our bases on the asteroids will spot and deflect anything too massive iin time - what we don't have bases in the asteroids yet? but I was promised we would by 2000, as well as flying cars, supersonic/flying wing liners, hotels in space and lots of other really neat stuff.
ttfn
flames - the later we leave it the bigger the flames we'll need to get rid of it.
Funny thing is that would work. the paper would reflect more sun light and work as a solar sail to change the trajectory. NASA/et.all are already looking into using mylar or aluminum foil for just such a plan.
Yay! Lets turn that single mass into multiple radioactive ones. That's a winner. After all, that cluster of rocks that hit Jupiter didn't do much.
Never mind, its not like we have a rocket capable of getting a nuke out of orbit let alone any form of space guidance.
I'm thinking there would be a difference between the ICBMs designed to level Russia and the kind of space-destined missiles designed to neutralise a flying cathedral. So perhaps Mr Obama McJesus' statement could be changed to say "no nukes aimed at this particular ball of rock."
Of course Nuking the NEOs would now have a lot of Church sized objects on their way to Earth that we would have to deal with.....
I think the idea is to probably to adjust its trajectory rather than split it into pieces. Also if you explode something into bits while it is far enough away, the debris will have spread so far apart it will go around the planet (like all the rest of the space junk).
surely we can either use it to create a black hole to suck said asteroid in or just plain point it up and see what happens?
Reagan was on the right track?
But why is there no mention of a Diamondillium shield?
"Nuclear explosions are the only current, practical means for dealing with large NEOs (diameters greater than 1 kilometer) or as a backup for smaller ones if other methods were to fail."
Er, and how big a nuke do you need to blast a kilometre-sized hole in a rock? I can certainly believe that nukes slightly increase the size of object we can deal with, but not by much in the woder scheme of things. I would also imagine that those sizes follow the usual rule with the population falling off with increasing scale, so the numbers of objects in this "window" is relatively small.
On the other hand, current rocket technology can't put much more than a few tons Up There, and a few tons of TNT isn't going to shift anything that the atmosphere wouldn't stop anyway.
So the boffins are correct that we need nukes, but have then driven a kilometre sized rock through their credibility. Pillocks.
I wonder if this report was funded by them?
Nukes in space? Hasn't Hollywood shown us anything in their films? You have to "nuke the *planet* from orbit, it's the only way to be sure"
Hasn't Jupiter been keeping us safe from NEOs for the last 4 billion or more years? I think I'd feel safer with the NEOs than various countries with a nuclear arsenal.
*voting for solar power, not nuclear power, if such an option ever becomes available*
Perhaps we could ask the dinosaurs for their take on that?
65 million years vs 4 million years? My vote remains!
Is there any particular reason for the ecclesiastical slant of your size scale for destruction raining down from the heavens... oh, I get it.
For Vatican read the Olympic village, for cathedral any Second Division football stadium, for church the open-topped double decker bus in which the triumphant athletes tour the city...
"Going to watch the Arsenal match this afternoon?" "No, no point." "Foregone conclusion, you reckon?" "No, the world's about to end." "Ah. Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did." "No, not really."
Methinks you're going to get quite a roasting from the more religious types.
Maybe you're looking for alternative heat sources to keep your offices warm ?
And thought they were listening to George Dubya's fan club.
There ain't no WMDs in orbit, but we'll sure find a way to put them up there, to defend us from God fearin' heathen asteroids and other places Osama might be hidin'
I guess by these figures, the Virginia doctors office meteorite was prayer book sized, i.e.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/22/virginia_doc_office_meteorite/
and that would make the famous Arizona Barringer impact crater (which was created by the Canyon Diablo meteorite) around probably about a church bus plus 300 prayer mats plus one golden candle stick holder in sized.
According to Buck Rodgers will ahve a planetary shield by then... I'm sure nothing will happen in the next 400 years... oh wait isn't something along these lines suppossed to be happening around 2012?
...Vatican sized????
This is a new precedent and we need to know where it fits into the weights and measures of the world we understand!
How many football pitches to a vatican? How many milliwales is it?
How many Olympic-Size swimming pools to a cathedral?
These questions need answering!
Just drop cathedral-size rocks on it. Very destructive and less radiation. Everybody wins!
...by things called "Mass Drivers", have featured in Sci-Fi like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Babylon 5, and even the Anime series Gundam (the original, not the numerious follow-up's).
Nothing's new.
Just to clarify for those who didn't read the report, the idea isn't to destroy to object with nukes, and thus create lots of smaller objects, it's to detonate a nuke and change the objects course so that it misses us.
They're pretty much saying that even with this strategy we'd need decades of planning to avoid ending up as toast.
As carrying about a bagful of bullets without a gun to use them in. I can't help but picture Wile E. Coyote holding a little clown umbrella over his head and a sign saying 'Oh, no' as our protection model for the foreseeable future.
Dealing with NEOs by means other than nuclear demolition may well be possible. If we wanted to deliver large technical payloads in a timely manner, we might need a spacecraft with an engine delivering very high specific impulse, and to me that looks like the Orion engine -- pulsed nuclear fission with a very big shockabsorber between the drive plate and the rest of the spacecraft.
Of course we could just make a very big pointy DU ballistic impactor, and use an Orion engine to make it move fast enough...
Breaking an asteroid into pieces is not the right way to deal with it. Instead, one would dig a hole in the asteroid, put the nuke in there, so that it would vaporize part of the asteroid, ejecting the results out of the top of the hole. The principle is the same as a rocket engine, but with much more energy involved, since an asteroid is much heavier than your ordinary spaceship.
The trouble with 'nuking' an asteroid is that even if you do succeed in fragmenting it you end up with several smaller asteroids all in the same orbit and the same combined kinetic energy.
So you are not really any better off because it's the total energy released in the impact that causes the damage. 1big bang vs. several smaller bangs.
What you actually need to do is shift the orbit of the asteroid without breaking it up (too much) so it doesn't hit the earth in the first place, this could be done with a nuke if you vapourised a chunk off one side to give it a hard nudge. Trouble is some asteroids are actually more like piles of rubble than single solid rocks so giving the sharp nudge will just break the thing up without changing the orbit so much.
What you really need is a gentle push over a long period for the most reliable and predictable results. Hence "gravity tractors", ion engines and the like.
That's why you need to spot'em early, so you've got time to do the gentle push over, preferably years.
Hit 'em with a string of altar sized lumps of moon rock.
The level of risk coupled with the cost is why this sort of thing isn't heavily invested in. It simply isn't worth it.
Likewise radiation shielding in the event of a massive radiation burst from a nearby star, which would wipe us out before we even knew what was happening. You might as well offer insurance against total existence failiure. I mean, who's going to be around in any state to collect?
"Hasn't Jupiter been keeping us safe from NEOs for the last 4 billion or more years?"
Hell no:
http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/Age.html
I think I prefer the idea of attaching (landing) a rocket engine onto the offending body and pushing it away that way. Much more controlled and actually possible and plausible. However the lead time to get it there remains large with all the planetary slingshots and stuff depending on the orbit. But if it's an NEO then surely the orbit is broadly similar to Earth so would not require too much manevering. I don't think we'd ever stop an Extinction Level Event*!
*not the Busta Rhymes album
If anyone here actually THINKS about the orbital mechanics necessary to land on a high-speed object _as it is approaching_ earth, you would quickly realise that it is IMPOSSIBLE. Most of these are moving faster than any human powered spacecraft has ever achieved, and worse, are headed FOR us (that is by definition, as otherwise the threat is very remote). That means that you have to catch-up to it, from behind, and match velocities to land - which (again remembering that we can't even fly that fast to begin with) means you have to fly outside of earth orbit, and then fly back in at a matching angle to the roid. Ummm, good luck with that - if you are REALLY lucky maybe the moon would be in the right position to whip around, but that is a remote possibility. With a great deal of warning you could accellerate to a point in the path of the roid, decellerate to a stop, and then re-acclellerate in the direction of the earth - but no chemical powered craft yet built (or close) could do that - too much fuel needed - an remember, you are carrying an engine and it's fuel, which is heavy.
Agree with the authors - you need to whack it from the front, and whack it hard. No need to approach it from behind.
Are these perpendicular gothic cathedrals or just the regular Roman basilica type?
And as for the nuclear weapons - roughly how many cardinals would they weigh?
Surely lots of small rocks are better than one big one. If you had the choice between getting shot in the chest with either a large calibre (.50) handgun or a shotgun I would assume the chances of survival favour the latter.
If a plus Vatican sized object was to hit then your looking at world wide destruction, extending the impact area with multiple catherdrals may only destory North America.
Actually you need to clarify your analogy and say at 200 yards or so. At point blank range any 12 gauge on up even with bird shot to the chest is likely to be as lethal as Desert Eagle (MW2 gets it right at close range, shotguns are fearsome weapons in close combat quarters, so much so the Germans tried to ban them in the trenches in WWI). At range your analogy works.
As the Roman Catholic Church is now the standard unit of measurement for asteroids, should we also classify the threat from abbey, monastery and convent sized objects? Perhaps throw in a Popemobile for minor objects.
maybe if we ask the Vogons nicely they'll clear up all that floating debris...
Anybody got a thumb I could borrow?
As when centuries later the object you deflected away from us hits something (ship, homeworld, colony etc) inhabited by some other developed species that it otherwise wouldnt have, if they work it out, they might be a tad disgruntled. Especially if they dont have the means to boot it on (or the morals not to).
Of course if they realise that it was only an accident, rather than a deliberat act of war, I'm sure they'll only pursue the matter in a civil court rather than travel back in time and obliterate us all from the timeline.
I suspect this really really could be heard in a US jurisdiction. That would be ironic and one could be smug and gloat about it being just desserts, but a bit like the French complaining about the US turning up in Haiti last week, it is really with the best of motives and the rest of us are just probably jealous of their capabilities.
Someone tell Lewis that the standard arbitrary illustrating units of measurements are:-
1. Beach ball.
2. Man
3. Double Decker bus (UK type)
4. Football Pitch (also UK type)
5. Nelsons Column
6. Saint Paul's Cathedral or the Albert Hall
For negative numbers, there is the "GordonBrown"
For an event to have absolutely no chancing of happening there is the "NuLab"
:)
Would be just our luck that some Dr Strangelove in the States gets yards and metres mixed up, and knocks a Double Decker sized rock into a collision course with the earth. But that would never happen would it?
Wonder if Apple have an App for that?
7. Eifell Towers
8. Ben Nevis's
9. Jamaica
Dunderhead! You should know perfectly well that in the BVS (British Vernacular System) height units are unrelated to length units. Nelson's column is a height and a double decker bus is a length. A football pitch is an area : I think.
Actually a double decker bus can also be a weight (no such thing as Mass of course in the BVS). I've never heard of a beach ball.
For area you forgot pin-head, finger nail, postage stamp and Wales.
In the BVS the units deliberately bear no ratio relationship to eachother - they rise in quantum steps. ie we go straight from a finger nail to a postage stamp.
You can have a large object crash into the earth and wipe out half a continent, or you can blow it into small pieces so that it turns the upper atmosphere into a huge white hot radiator that fries/boils most of the surface of the planet.
@ravenviz - An NEO only has to be close to the earth once to be an NEO , its orbit can be completely different from earths. Space is big and it has some very big things in it. Our technology could just about say Doh! if we are very very lucky.
If so, it raises the question of whether there's an NRB, and exactly what it's up to...
Require desperate remedies...
I'd much rather have 20% of the Vatican, mildly radioactive and in small lumps hitting the planet than 100% of it in a single piece...
Flame, because the fireworks display would be awesome
