Interesting
Interesting, but not shocking. Don't objects of this size, and bigger, fall to earth all the time, but are just not spotted?
Bruce Willis's services will not be required today as a diminutive asteroid passes close to Earth, skimming over Singapore at an altitude of 45,000 kilometers (27,960 miles). Our planet's closest encounter with Asteroid 2010 TD54 takes place at 10:50 GMT (5:50 EST), but there's 'zero probability' of the 5 to 10 metre wide …
I'm sure you'd have appreciated the view if it fell in your area, hmm ?
By the way, the asteroid that caused the Tunguska event didn't make it to Earth surface either, but it sure made a lot of trees unhappy. I'm pretty sure people in New York or Tokyo wouldn't much like it to happen to them.
As I post this, the close encounter is still 15 minutes away, so it hadn't missed yet. I think it's a good thing we can detect events like this, as it indicates we are approaching the capability of detecting other asteroid encounters that would be harmful, in time to do something about them.
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This is not true.
Consider this assertation: Every man will die.
In every case, this is and will be true. This is holds true even if you are religious, Jesus died. (Ok I am being a bit flippant but you get the point).
Probability - unity.
Now, the more philosophical amongst you will probably argue that that depends on how exactly probability is defined, but as you can see, from a practical point of view, I have proven your statement to be false.
The orbit of this little sucker is rather irrelevant, it is unlikely it could cause any serious damage on the ground, even if it did come down right at a major city.
More importantly, we need to spot any big asteroids coming at us years in advance if we want to have any serious chance of altering their orbit in order to save ourselves. A month of warning won't do, a few years might just give us enough time to hit it with a few nukes a couple of months before it hits and alter its course enough to make it miss.
Untrue. Nukes are grand for making a great big punch. It is all a question of directing the energy. A bunker buster is for all intents and purposes a focused nuke, and that would impart enough energy in many cases to "nudge" a threatening asteroid a few meters in a given direction. Remember that if you do it right, at the right part of the object’s orbit, you don’t need more than a nudge.
The Sun is great and all, but apart from periodic coronal mass ejections, getting hit by solar radiation is like being on the receiving end of a slightly more irritable ion drive. Solar winds just aren’t powerful enough to really affect something with the mass of an asteroid but a low surface/mass ratio. The only exception to this is if the asteroid in question is chalk full of volatiles. At that point, enough solar radiation will vaporise the volatiles. This can lead to the volatiles reaching escape velocity and thusly exerting thrust on the mass in question.
Apart from the sudden specific impulse method of lobbing a few largeish bunker-busters at your asteroid of choice, nukes also offer a grand method of creating an interstellar shotgun. Think of a properly outfitted spacecraft as being a sort of spacebourne claymore. You detonate a directed charge into a pusher plate. This plate translates the force of the explosion into a large array of kinetic impactors (“bullets” for lack of a better term.) The pusher also deals with blocking most of the ionising radiation from the blast, thus preventing vaporising your payload. The kinetic impactors rip into your asteroid of choice at relativistic velocities shredding the object and imparting different angular velocities to the remnant bits.
Whilst turning one dangerous falling object into many is generally a bad plan, if you do it far enough away from earth, by the time it arrives you have a fairly harmless and largely dispersed cloud of smallish debris that will harmlessly burn up in the atmosphere.
In short, nukes are plenty useful in space. You just have to understand their characteristics. Trying to use them in space the same way we would use them here on earth is pointless. On Earth, it isn’t the nuke that kills you. It’s the wall of unimaginably hot plasma that gets you. No atmosphere in space to create a plasma shockwave means totally different rules about how you use a nuke.
Yep, sorry people. Any asteroid big enough to cause serious damage to the Earth and/or the human race pretty much travel so fast that you could fire millions of nukes at them and it wouldn't even skip a beat (imagine trying to stop or alter a bullets trajectory by blowing on it). Any Bruce Willis'esque space mission would only cause it to just fracture causing us to parish from a downpour rather than a single impact.
Our only course of action would be to somehow either use some kind of device to land on the asteroid and use solar sails or propulsion to slowly alter its trajectory or to use said device on another massive object to cue ball the impending doom, assuming we get that device to the asteroid in-time. Which you are right Remy, would probably require years of advance notice.
the best way to deal with the killer 'roid from blazing through our atmosphere and causing complete destruction, is to fill the shuttles with as many lawyers, solicitors, politicians and religious zealots as you can.
rather than sinking nukes into the asteroid. we ramset those bastards to it. If my calculations are correct ( and they usually are) we're still screwed, but, we have reduced the population of oxygen stealers that will contrbiute to the famine that will follow