Asteroid Day

[Fijimn]

Tomorrow is Asteroid Day, a day organized to bring more awareness to the dangerous that lurk in space. I have such an irrational fear of asteroids...

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/spac...ic-blind-spot-threats-above-n383496?cid=sm_fb

 

[ericram]

Not sure it will happen in our lifetime, but the earth is due to get hit.

 

[Spearchucker87]

Not sure it will happen in our lifetime, but the earth is due to get hit.

I think we'll undoudedly get hit by Tunguskas from time to time, as they're probably too small to detect and do anything about. The biggest most dangerous, we are rapidly perfecting the ability to detect them years ahead of time. Whether we could nudge it off course is another matter. That would be a huge technical problem, sending some kind of a space mission to attach some kind of propulsion to it. It would only take a relatively small amount of propulsion, but how the hec do you match trajectories with it and attach something? You would have to leave earth at escape velocity of 7 miles per second like the moon missions did, then slow down and match a fast INCOMING velocity. Then somehow slow down again to land on earth (unless a robotic or suicide mission), all the while carrying an extremely heavy cargo of attachable booster rockets.

If we found a really big one heading this way tomorrow, about all we could do is create the blueprints for a mission to hit it with a few nuclear warheads. I don't think you can "nudge" it with nukes, as in the vacuum of space I don't think you have a fireball of expanding hot gases. You just get a lot of light and heat. It wouldn't be easy to get a lot of megatonage on it before it was really close. But if that "smaller" amount of nukes was enough to break it into 2-3 chunks, they'd probably change directions enough to save us.

 

[Spearchucker87]

I don't think you can "nudge" it with nukes, as in the vacuum of space I don't think you have a fireball of expanding hot gases. You just get a lot of light and heat. It wouldn't be easy to get a lot of megatonage on it before it was really close. But if that "smaller" amount of nukes was enough to break it into 2-3 chunks, they'd probably change directions enough to save us.

Wait a minute, need some physics expertise. Why would it crack, just based on intense heat. But maybe it vaporizes some on the side where the explosion is. Now that Would give you a nudging effect. Problem solved?

 

[ericram]

Obviously the only thing that will work is to get a rag tag group of miners. Send then up to the asteroid and drill a deep hole to drop a nuke in it.

 

[cmanole]

We can't even get a rocket into orbit anymore, what makes you think we can do all that?

 

[Oclawaha]

We could pay the Russians a couple billion to wham a soyuz into the thing. Maybe they could drop some supplies off at the ISS on the way out.