- I would vastly prefer an attempt to capture any such asteroid into earth orbit...
Posted on 10/26/2010 7:37:06 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
In separate 10-page letters to the House Committee on Science and Technology and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, outlines plans for "(A) protecting the United States from a near-Earth object that is expected to collide with Earth; and (B) implementing a deflection campaign, in consultation with international bodies, should one be necessary."
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While Holdren indicates that no large asteroid or comet presents an immediate hazard to our planet, the fact that devastating impacts have occurred on Earth in the distant past is enough to warrant safety precautions for the future...
Asteroids are rocky bodies found within the inner solar system, originating in an area known as the asteroid belt, located between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
If a large asteroid were to strike Earth, it could cause a global climate change, which many scientists believe is what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago -- not a good prospect for life on Earth in the present day if a similar event occurred.
NASA's Near Earth Object program, or NEO, looks for and monitors asteroids that are at least a kilometer in diameter... After 12 years of cosmic hunting, NASA search teams have determined that 149 NEOs larger than a kilometer in size are in orbits that might pose a problem for Earth, but none is considered an impact threat in the next 100 years...
(Excerpt) Read more at aolnews.com ...
According to Greco-Roman literature at least the world was somehow or other protected from such problems in recent prehistoric time. We no longer are, and just getting rid of I-slam and inbreeding won’t fix the problem. We’re capable of solving this one and we need to.
You can be certain they’re looking for an excuse to create a new tax!
I see two hugely partisan aspects of this.
The first one is consulting international bodies. If we stop to do this, we will never accomplish the task, and our children will perish.
The second one is the very concept of deflecting an asteroid. I would vastly prefer an attempt to capture any such asteroid into earth orbit, claim it for the US, be prepared to militarily defend this new territory, and mine it.
A vast source of material which is not at the bottom of either Earth's gravity well or the Moon's would be an enormous advantage in the exploration and colonization of the solar system.
interesting idea. I thought asteroids were primarily composed of iron, which is abundant here on earth. What would be the upside of capturing one to mine?
A sufficiently powerful series of *conventional* EMP devices would place us all in the front row seats of the off-Broadway revival of 1850, which features confusion and stars no radio-isotopic identification technology.
How ‘bout this, we call it — “Tax-eroid!”
More Moons Around Earth? It's Not So LoonyEarth has a second moon, of sorts, and could have many others. Cruithne, the 3-mile-wide (5-km) satellite, takes 770 years to complete a horseshoe-shaped orbit around Earth, and will remain in a suspended state around Earth for at least 5,000 years. Every 385 years, it comes to its closest point to Earth, some 9.3 million miles (15 million kilometers) away. Its next close approach to Earth comes in 2285. "We found new dynamical channels through which free asteroids become temporarily moons of Earth and stay there from a few thousand years to several tens of thousands of years," said Fathi Namouni, one of the researchers, now at Princeton University. Namouni's colleague Apostolos Christou said, "At specific points in its orbit, it reverses its rate of motion with respect to Earth so it will appear to go back and forth." In his view, there are three classes of moons -- large moons in near-circular orbits around a planet, having formed soon after the planet; smaller fragments that are the products of collisions; and outer, irregular moons in odd orbits, or captured asteroids like Cruithne. In the past year, astronomers have reported finding such objects around Uranus.
by Robin Lloyd
October 29 1999
:’) Hey, I’m pretty sure we’d all be surprised if one hit in October. If it were about three miles across, our surprise wouldn’t last long. One mile wide (with a little wiggle room for velocity and density) would deliver more energy than all the world’s nukes piled up and set off simultaneously; three miles is circa three times bigger in all three dimensions, hence, 27 times more powerful (again, with a little wiggle room). i.e., kinda serious. But undeniably surprising.
This is a first:
Statist Climate change scientist that I believe!
yeap, they have cried wolf so much people will not believe them when a real problem comes up.
:’)
It’s happened before, it will happen again. Not the part about believing a statist climate change scientist. :’)
:’)
Yes but how are you going to gte the nuke/satellite on the asteroid far enough away in time to do its work?
By the time gets within the solar system its to late IMO.
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