back to article Forget Ben Affleck – US, Euro boffins to SMASH spaceship into asteroid

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are working out how to use spacecraft to stop asteroids smashing into planets – Earth in particular. Youtube Video The Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission is composed of two separate spacecraft: ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) and NASA-led Double Asteroid …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    "But it will tell us a lot about the asteroid itself and how they react to impacts, which could be vital to the future (or not) of humanity."

    We might even find out how alien bases disguised as asteroids react to impacts...

  2. Your alien overlord - fear me

    My IDEA (Impact, Deflection Extreme Assesment) is to FIRE (Fly, Impact, Reassess Expertly) a ROCKET (Reach Orbit Cleanly Kinda Extra Terrestially) at the ASTEROID (A Sitting Target Easily Reached Over Indeterminal Distances) for FUN (F*cked Up Naturally) and SCIENCE (Study Complex Interesting Explosion eNding Comets Existance).

    So NASA/ESA can I get a job in your 'making up names for stuff' department?

  3. Grikath

    5 years?!!

    To build a bloody satellite... You'd think they'd gotten the basics down by now....

    1. Chemist

      Re: 5 years?!!

      "5 years?!! "

      Remember all the committee time to debate the styling, logos, colour schemes. Then building mock-ups, rendering obligatory animation sequences, and other press-release related activites. Then the panic about the funding shortfall due to most of the budget being spent on the aforementioned early stages requiring redesign, cutbacks on features, styling and functions..................

      1. Kharkov
        Angel

        Re: 5 years?!! And won't someone please think of the... fonts.

        And don't forget the whole Times New Roman vs Ariel interdepartmental war that is, at this point in history, pretty much mandated.

        Bureaucracy, considering itself more important than the project (whatever the project is) since... bureaucracy was invented!

        On a more useful note, this experiment could be followed up by a (probably very small) 'pusher' module - think solar panels, batteries/capacitors & an ion drive - and see if, over time, it can a) have a greater effect on the target, and b) control or at least influence the direction of the target.

        Slow but continuous acceleration is probably the way to get humans to the Outer system so the follow-up will have a double purpose...

        1. choleric
          Trollface

          Re: 5 years?!! And won't someone please think of the... fonts.

          > Times New Roman vs Ariel

          I think you'll find in section 16.a.41.xvi paragraph 3 bullet point 45 from the minutes of the most recent meeting of the Font Police Working Group appointed by the sub-committee for Navel-Gazing and Snot Eating that the correct name is "Arial".

    2. yoganmahew

      Re: 5 years?!!

      From the way the epic were detailed in the ESA video, it's clearly an agile project.

      5 years is a target, but it might be later if the cadence of the burndown exceeds the angle of the dangle.

    3. phuzz Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: 5 years?!!

      Well, it is rocket science after all.

      (And this is a bespoke satellite which will need to be designed to do something no other spacecraft has done before. If you want quick turn around, get a cubesat)

      1. Grikath

        Re: 5 years?!! @ Phuzz

        The whole mission literally calls for nothing that has not been done before. Quite frequently, actually. Check what the mission actually calls for.. The only difference is mere spatial location.

        Interplanetary travel and orbit matching at location [x,y,z,v]? That should be more a funtion of launch window by now. Not the tech-breaking difficulty of the technology used. Launching companion-satellite cubesats? That's "amateur" territory. Lander package? Ummm how often do you need to practice? Things have landed on Stuff since to damn '60's, and there's no atmosphere to contend with, so you can add all the zero-grav orbit matching/rendezvous with all the manned missions as well. Laser comms? An impactor with just a telescope and telemetry? Come on...

        Yes, everything needs to be redundant, and tested, and Stuff. But if they can't have a design whipped up in a month, and built within another 6 months or so, from proven designs, they're bloody stupid.

        May sound ranty, but there's no technical reason nowadays why this should take so long.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    if we're talking film influences

    I thought we'd do as in the film Meteor. Fire a bunch of orbit-based nukes at it.

    We don't have any orbiting missile stations?

    1. Kharkov
      Pirate

      Re: if we're talking film influences

      I always thought that Meteor, with the great Sean Connery, was a bit of a strange film. Why have rockets with big, and long, fuel tanks to fire down into Earth's gravity well? A much smaller solid-fuel rocket to kick it out of orbit, with probably liquid-fuel attitude control rockets to tweak its descent would have been all that was needed.

      Even worse, to get all those rockets up there in the first place suggests a monster launch capability by the USSR & USA so why not launch from...

      Sorry, old movies involving technology, I can't stop myself from nitpicking them. Repeat ten times, we follow the rule of cool and Hollywood Physics is all the reality we need, people.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: if we're talking film influences

        For the time, the alternate flashing between the head-on views of the US (black/white quartered) and Soviet (red naturally) warheads just before their strike was quite dramatic.

    2. Jonathan Richards 1

      Re: if we're talking film influences

      > We don't have any orbiting missile stations?

      No. No we don't, for the very good and entirely sufficient reason that nuclear weapons in orbit are prohibited by international treaty. If any of the nuclear powers got caught *putting* nukes up there, the odds of "World War Three - The Last One" would suddenly get much shorter.

      Article IV of Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies

      States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, instal such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.

      The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.

      Source: http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/outer_space/text

      1. Jonathan Richards 1
        WTF?

        Space weapons

        Self-reply, sorry.

        I just realised that, should malign and violent extra-terrestrial intelligences turn up on our celestial doorstep (see Hollywood output, passim), we'd first have to get the UN together and quickly amend this treaty so that it limits itself to inter-human warfare, otherwise attempting to wipe out the baddies will be a breach of the treaty, and we couldn't be having that, oh no.

        What's that, Sooty? Safe Harbor? I've got no idea why that's relevant.

  5. jake Silver badge

    Collateral damage?

    Are the things solid? Or a loose conglomeration of aggregate?

    Methinks that if the latter, bashing into one might change things from a pair of objects with a common center of gravity to a large object surrounded with perhaps tens of millions of objects with a somewhat similar trajectory and the same momentum ... so instead of a couple rocks bypassing Earth, the Earth might get hit with a partial shotgun blast containing the same kinetic energy as one large boulder.

    I am not an astro boffin. I do know how to use both cannon and shotguns.

    1. Thecowking

      Re: Collateral damage?

      If the debris is that small, then they're not much of a problem, as they will abrade rapidly and just make some pretty shooting stars.

      Larger ones are more likely (I'm guessing they've done the maths on this and the various momentum calculations, NASA know their stuff) to not get the energy from the impact to deviate from their orbit enough to hit the Earth.

      All this is just extrapolation from first principles, I've not actually looked into the proposal, but I did do astroboffinery at university some decade and change ago. So read into it what you will.

  6. Zork-1
    Devil

    Don't!

    Any bet that they will miscalculate and the "small" impact will send the "tiny" moon towards Earth?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Forget Ben Affleck"

    good advice for everyday use. Thanks El Reg

  8. Benchops

    Yet more practical astrology adjustment! What are they trying to do to us? (by "us" I mean capricorns)

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