Japan pauses asteroid BOMBING raid – still no word from Bruce Willis? Japan's space agency JAXA has called off the launch of its Hayabusa2 asteroid-mining mission. The plan is to send a probe to a far-flung space rock, blast a hole in it, grab some material, and return it to Earth. However, bad weather on our home world this week has delayed the launch of the gutsy expedition to sometime next …
ArtSat 2 will accompany Hayabusa 2 on the rocket before being pushed out into deep space. For seven days, on battery power, this sculpture will broadcast Dadaist poetry generated from its own sensor data. Thereafter, it will remain in orbit around the sun as an artificial asteroid for perhaps billions of years. The material from which the sculpture is made is expected to degrade after maybe hundreds of thousands of years (radiation), but a 2D representation of the sculpture in, iirc silicon, will be everlasting.
Last week I met one of the ArtSat project's designers at a Maker Faire. Apparently, they've have spent only around $100,000 on the entire project. Presumably their launch is free or cut-price.
http://artsat.jp/
My wife is an artist (fine art) and rather intensely dislikes abstract and "modern art". I tend to agree with her, it's not my cup of tea as well. To each his own, said the lady as she kissed her cow.
Our conversation for this satellite went as follows, a brief description of the project and goals, then a brief Q&A session, placed below.
So, as I said, this is essentially an art project in spaaaaace.
Yes.
So, would you want that on your coffee table?
No.
Just as well that they're throwing it off of the planet, huh?
(Smiled, chuckled and agreed.)
I'm sure they've thought of this, but...
I can see that dropping a bomb will blast a hole. But given that asteroid gravity tends to be somewhat gentle (how far did Philae bounce?) how likely is it that any rubble will end up in the hole, rather than flying off into oblivion, possibly bashing the intrepid space-bomber on the way?
I'm dubious of the utility of any explosive, as over half of the explosive force would be outward, rather than toward rock, save if it's accelerated enough to penetrate before detonation.
I'd lean more toward a kinetic penetrator, which is well proven technology, both on and off of Earth.
I seem to recall the penetrating harpoon notion being tried and it was an abysmal failure.
Meanwhile, a kinetic penetrator did work on an asteroid once and did quite a bang up job of it.
Pun intended.
The only difference between missions would be going down and collecting chunks that fell back, rather than being vaporized.
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