I haven't seen a Honda Comet in years.
:-)
Posted on 12/15/2016 11:08:50 AM PST by billorites
Imagine a giant asteroid is hurtling toward the Earth. The killer space rock has managed to avoid detection until a few days or weeks before impact, and our options for saving ourselves are running low. What do we do?
According to some researchers, our best option is to nuke it.
There are tens of thousands of asteroids that could potentially collide with the Earth. NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is in charge of cataloging all of these potential threats and developing plans to protect ourselves from them. For many of these asteroids, we'd be able to see them coming months or years before they actually impact, and for them, the best option is just to hit the asteroid with something non-nuclear. A small directional impact would divert the asteroid enough to cause it to miss us—assuming we hit it early enough.
But for last-minute asteroid deflection, the only real option is a nuke. This was the conclusion presented by researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last week.
It's not unprecedented for a killer asteroid to sneak up on us. Just a few months ago, astronomers spotted an asteroid just a few hours before it narrowly missed us. It's not out of the question that that could happen again, and next time we might not be so lucky. With only a few hours of warning, we might need to use a nuke.
According to the scientists, nukes are pretty much ideal for asteroid redirection. In addition to the large explosion, nukes release a lot of high-energy radiation, which causes the surface of the asteroid to vaporize. This vapor creates thrust, which further propels the asteroid away from the Earth.
Of course, launching nukes isn't something that NASA can just do, so there are a lot of conversations that need to happen in order to put this plan in motion. But this is a first step toward a nuclear-armed planetary defense force protecting all of us from killer asteroids.
Oh it’s coming alright. The Bible prophesies in Revelation that one or two of these things have our number on it, but it will be during the horrific seven-year tribulation which I believe will occur sometime in the last part of this century.
If you’re a Christian rejoice because you will be in Heaven at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb during the seven-year tribulation and have nothing to fear. If you’re not a Christian, come to Jesus now. Today is the day of salvation.
We should probably pay close attention to Comet 45 Honda.
It is scheduled for a very close flyby to earth as it is slingshots away from the sun on an eliptical orbit which is very close to ours.
Assuming the comet stays intact during the most stressful part of it’s trajectory around the sun, it is not projected to hit us. However, if it breaks apart as it makes it’s turn, we could be in a world of hurt.
Here is one of several videos on it showing that trajectory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv5RSihhkM0
Is there something they’re not telling us?
Yeah, we can all become Morlocks!
We’d need several nukes, and a delivery system. Some Saturn-V type rockets on standby, ready to be fueled and launched within a few days notice. The movie “Armageddon” was ridiculous, by the way. Disregarding all the other scientifically flawed premises, you can’t blow up an asteroid the size of Texas with a nuke. That’s not even an asteroid per se—more like a rogue moon. Altering the asteroid’s trajectory is the best option, but it’s easiest done while still far from Earth. The trouble is that the farther the asteroid is, the harder it becomes to calculate its course. Hitting it too early may mean setting it on a collision course with Earth when it otherwise might have missed.
forgot to mention on Comet 45 Honda...
We should be able to see it easily around end of December before it makes it’s nearby pass in the first week of February in 2017.
Baloney.
NASA and all other alphabet agencies should be ignored until the new Sheriff arrives.
Nothing, at this point, can be taken seriously.
“The trouble is that the farther the asteroid is, the harder it becomes to calculate its course.”
Only in movies. We have super computers for this sort of thing. It is not that hard.
According to the Wikipedia page 'Operation Fishbowl' (high-altitude US nuke tests in the early 60's), we've detonated 5 at high altitude, with only two of them ("Starfish Prime" and "Checkmate") actually going into what is considered 'space'.
Anything above the 'Karman line' of 62 miles up is considered 'space'. "Checkmate" was detonated at 91 miles up, and "Starfish Prime" at 250 miles.
They need some test runs to get experience at doing this. Once a big asteroid on a collision path with Earth appears it will be a bit late to learn.
I hope I don’t see posts indicating that there are Freepers ignorant enough to be worried about polluting space with radioactivity. Space is awash with cosmic rays and radiation. It is like being worried about getting dirt dirty.
I haven't seen a Honda Comet in years.
:-)
Having to invent nonsensical missions is very sad commentary on the state of NASA.
Shills for AGW and now this stupidity. (what happens to the smaller rocks?)
(Hint: Trajectory doesn’t change and we get shotgunned vs. canon balled)
Then there is the Tarsid theory ... once upon a time a really big comet was torn apart somewhere in an Earth crossing orbit and formed a torus of debris - a debris field which the Earth passes through in Spring and Fall. Somewhere in that field are pieces a mile or more in diameter which will eventually strike Earth when the orbits align.
This theory forms the basis of the Ice Age ending occurrence (a strike in the ice field in what is now Canada - melting the ice and causing worldwide fires & floods) and the onslaught of the Younger Dryas over a thousand years later (a second strike causing a rapid cooling and reformation of glaciers). There is recent geologic evidence for this theory which is gaining credibility every year.
According to a re-reading of various ‘doomsday prophesies’, the next occurrence is due between now and 2060.
Wouldn’t faze us if it is out of the atmosphere and it would have to be to deflect the rock.
In the atmosphere, different story.
That’s not from the movies. In “Lucifer’s hammer” the odds that the comet would hit earth kept going up the closer it got to Earth because it became easier to calculate. The asteroid Apophis may hit the earth in 2029, but we don’t know for sure. We only know that the odds are very small. The problem is gravitational perturbations due to all the debris in the solar system. It’s too much data to process, and although the unknowns are small by comparison to the knowns, even a tiny miscalculation means a lot when compounded over time.
Hasn’t this been the plot of a gzillion Movis/TV Movies?
You have a mile wide asteroid coming in. You nuke it. Then you have four quarter miles asteroids coming in hundreds if not thousands of mile apart.
That could work!
/s
I’m more inclined to think we need to develop something that could meet the asteroid millions of miles from us, that would exert thrust from the side to change it’s path.
Doing so far away, we would probably only have to change it’s path a fraction of a degree.
Not splintering it, we could avoid all the debris that would accompany a nuclear detonation. And we wouldn’t be able to guide that debris in any direction.
We could be developing a space shotgun shell to hit earth in many locations with massive space debris.
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