Deadly Game with Asteroids
Discussion
Heard about this on Today just now...
[i]Don Quixote to charge right into asteroid[/i]
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/space/SpaceRepublish_1156884.htm
Basically we're going to play billiards with an asteroid, just to practice.
Now this asteroid was never going to hurt us.
But don't you remember when you started playing billiards/snooker/pool. Just occasionally, you'd manage to balls it up completely and pocket the wrong one, yes? Well what if they go and knock one asteroid into something else and that hits something else and eventually something come back to hit us!??? :eek:
[i]Don Quixote to charge right into asteroid[/i]
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/space/SpaceRepublish_1156884.htm
Basically we're going to play billiards with an asteroid, just to practice.
Now this asteroid was never going to hurt us.
But don't you remember when you started playing billiards/snooker/pool. Just occasionally, you'd manage to balls it up completely and pocket the wrong one, yes? Well what if they go and knock one asteroid into something else and that hits something else and eventually something come back to hit us!??? :eek:
So you have a rock or lead asteroid, possibly a mile across moving at thousands of miles per hour. And a little alloy satellite is going to crash into it? So what! It's going to do bugger all. It would be like a flea landing on an elephant. Unless it's packing a nuclear warhead it will be a total waste of time.
4WD said:
So you have a rock or lead asteroid, possibly a mile across moving at thousands of miles per hour. And a little alloy satellite is going to crash into it? So what! It's going to do bugger all. It would be like a flea landing on an elephant. Unless it's packing a nuclear warhead it will be a total waste of time.
Part of the point of the mission though is to find out more about what they're made of and how they're stuck together - i.e. to go some way to finding out how likely your lead asteroid is. (Would be worth a f|_|ck of a lot of money if you could move it somewhere useful)
I would imagine that the main point of this mission to to find out a bit more about how asteroids are actually made - rather than to shift it. That "angle" has veen seized on by the press whose scientific knowledge of asteroids was probably gleaned from watching "Armageddon" repeatedly.
Nah - we'll be fine. Mention asteroids and people immediately visualise stuff from various sci-fi films: the Millennium Falcon dodging between spinning rocks and the like. Reality is somewhat different - there are huuuuuge amounts of space between asteroids, so unless you pull of the jammiest fluke shot ever you're not going to pot the black on the break. 
4WD said:
So you have a rock or lead asteroid, possibly a mile across moving at thousands of miles per hour. And a little alloy satellite is going to crash into it? So what! It's going to do bugger all. It would be like a flea landing on an elephant. Unless it's packing a nuclear warhead it will be a total waste of time.
Nope. Its the nuke thats a total waste of time. You can let off a great big bang and it isn't going to do a thing...if its too close.
Thump the thing with feather early enough and you might only deflect its course by 0.1x10-66m but that could be enough to create a diversion in its course of tens of thousands of miles some years later.
The key to protecting the earth (if we're ever to do it) is to map every last object capable of doing us harm, preducting their orbits accurately for thousands of years into the future, and deciding early enough to do something about it. You might do something very, very insignificant at the time - but later it would count.
Don said:
The key to protecting the earth (if we're ever to do it) is to map every last object capable of doing us harm, preducting their orbits accurately for thousands of years into the future, and deciding early enough to do something about it. You might do something very, very insignificant at the time - but later it would count.
I wonder if that has ever been done before, in ancient history, and we are only now reaping the benefits...
some scientists said:
Astronomers are aware that the theory of the devastating effect an asteroid impact possibly had on the world's dinosaurs 65 million years ago is producing phenominal grants from gullible civil servants and that they had better do something extravagant with them.
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